How I became a Street Photographer
Like a lot of things in my life I fell into street photography. I’ve always had a creative side, whether it was writing, playing guitar or now photography. Something inside me always wanted to express something within. Since I moved to Manchester around 10 years ago I was still playing a lot of guitar but looking back I think I was falling out of love with playing the guitar.
I’ve been playing since I was 13 and without being specific, that was a long time ago! When I moved here I was living in a bungalow with no neighbours within 50 feet of my house so I use to be able to crank up my amplifiers and just play as loud as I wanted. I didn’t know anyone in the city so I would play guitar a lot and I was always searching for the “perfect tone”, swapping amps, foot pedals and guitar in search of it. In some ways though I think I was looking for novelty that would freshen up an interest that had gone a bit stale for me. I got good at playing guitar through sheer determination and will. I never had any talent but I wanted to play guitar so badly that I would practice for hours upon hours, sometimes up to 8 hours a day. And although I improved and got to a high level, it was always hard for me to learn to play new stuff. Anything I could learn easily I got bored with and anything that was interesting would take me hours, days and months of repetitive drilling, playing the same thing again and again, alone in my bedroom as a teen and alone in my bungalow years later. It was a solitary hobby. Throughout the years I think I got progressively burned out with it
Anyway, where were we? Oh right, how I got into photography. I had been looking for another hobby for a long time to replace or complement the guitar, something creative and that’s when I met a girl. I was running a social coffee group and a girl would come to my group and we got talking and she was into photography. Specifically street photography, something I’d never heard of and was kind of intrigued by as I was intrigued by this girl! Anyway I got into photography to impress her and realised early on that although I had no idea about composition, processing or any of the basics, I had a talent for seeing emotion in strangers on the streets and I also had the balls to photograph strangers up close. And of course I was driven by a desire to impress this girl! A strong motivator indeed! Anyway to cut a long story short and maybe I’ll cover some more of my journey in depth in a future post. At first I was crap even though there was a seed of talent there it had to be nurtured over many thousands of pictures and thousands of steps through cold, rainy days and nights in the city.
And in case you’re still wondering about the girl? I never impressed her enough with either my photography or my charm (such as it is!) but even after I came to terms with that, there was a person I HAD impressed with my photography and that was me. I had found a new hobby and I could feel early on that even though I would never be the best I definitely had something there and that was enough to pull me in to this weird world of street photography. I tried many other types of photography but it was always the streets that I kept calling me back and here I am now around 7 years off and on of photography later. I feel on my day I can take a decent photo and have produced over the years a body of work that while it won’t get me into a museum I am proud of. I am still learning as we all are and today I have come full circle and am looking for another hobby to complement my photography and hope to share some anecdotes, technical advice to anyone who is interested in reading. I hope this blog will be another creative outlet for me to enjoy. I think these days as life is made much easier for us by technology and much harder for us in other ways the need to be creative and express oneself will always be there. And this is exactly what I intend to do here and in my photography. I hope you will accompany me on my journey. I hope to publish weekly on a Sunday or Monday evening. Until the next time, this is me signing off.
