STREET WALKING

Originally published February 16, 2009

I finally got cracking on my street photography assignment on Sunday morning. Sun was shining brightly but heavens, was it cold or what! I was squeezing it in between shoots for my newspaper, walking around the main street of the capital Valletta and hitting the Sunday flea market just outside the city walls. Originally I’d planned on just taking one camera after removing its vertical grip and one lens, but because I was still technically speaking working for the paper I had to take my full kit, albeit packed away. So I couldn’t remain as inconspicuous as I’d hoped. I guess my thick blue fleece jacket didn’t help in that respect either. The restrictions of one camera, one lens (a 28, 35 or 50), black and white and 400 ISO remained in force. I opted to stick to 35mm.

I was primarily looking for interplay of highlights and shadows, using deep black shadows to create graphic shapes. At the same time, I had to try capture those decisive moments when everything comes together in a split instant. Though shooting in black and white, it was pretty clear to me that many of the images I was making work far better in colour. Not a problem really, as I was shooting in RAW anyhow, so converting back to colour is pretty straight forward. In some cases, the images don’t work at all in black and white, but once seen in colour, I find them rather more striking.

People can sometimes be a bit confrontational here so I had to try very hard to be discreet. Occasionally someone may take offence at having their picture taken and start spouting all sorts of nonsense about data protection laws, even though it’s very clear they have no idea what the law actually says. Other times people will make it a point to walk around you or avoid you when they see your camera. Lifting the camera at the very last second doesn’t always solve the problem, because in that instant you don’t always get your carefully thought-out composition perfectly right. In one case though, it worked out just fine when I reacted instantly to an elderly man in a slow run across a square. None of it was preplanned, not the angle, not the composition, I even had to instinctively run a few paces after him…. but it’s one of my favourite shots from the morning.

I also found myself thinking hard about how long one should stay in one spot, where the stage is set and you’re just waiting for your actors to walk into the space. Is it time to move on when you’ve made one decent shot of it? Or hang around because something even better might come along? in the end, wanting to get a variety of pictures and also because of the biting cold, I decided to move along once I knew I had an image which felt right.

It took a while to get into the zone, to really warm up to the shoot, but by the time I got to the flea market, I was being more daring. The hustle and bustle of the place naturally helped, as did the presence of many camera-toting tourists, but it actually is the place where one should be most careful about shooting. I afterwards found out that it’s not the first time that a market vendor has practically assaulted someone for taking pix of him.

All in all, I was pleased with the photos. Some were also used on the Reuters wire, so presumably, I did something right.

I’m attaching some of the pictures in both colour and black and white.