My wife Lisa and I spent a month in Argentina (with a short detour across the Rio Plata to Uruguay as well) this past November, our follow-up trip to getting married last July.  The wine was fantastically tasty, the weather warm and the people warmer. And the light and landscape were pretty fabulous too. A sampling of photos from our journey.

Here’s a peek at a collection I put together of my street photos taken in Edmonton. These are 9 of 15 images that I will be using for exhibition in Edmonton in 2013.

I had substantial help from Owen on this, as well as some friends in a critique group on flickr. Curating your own work is really hard! It’s so easy to develop an attachment to an image based on how you felt when you took it, or what you were attempting to achieve. Sometimes what you see in your own images is not at all evident to viewers lacking your inside knowledge of them. Having others view my work with a critical eye has really helped me divorce me from attachment to my images, which I think has helped me improve as a photographer. I do photography to capture what I see that I find interesting, but I also do it in order to share it with others. When it comes to sharing, it needs to be accessible, or else it is a slice of time without meaning.

Edmonton can be a difficult place to do street photography. We have long, cold nights in the winter, and even during the long, warm days at the height of summer it can be hard to find people outside of a handful of reliably busy settings in this largely suburban city. But  challenges are often opportunities. The dark winter night is dramatic, and loneliness and isolation are themes that I have tried to explore in the Edmonton context. Some of the shots below could only have been taken in Edmonton, I think. And that is part of what I find so interesting about street photography: the uniqueness of place.

Thanks again, Owen, for your help in reviewing my work.
 

I was inspired to try my hand at shooting nightlife on Whyte Avenue by Maciej Dakowicz, a Polish street photographer based in Cardiff, Wales. His shots of drinking culture after midnight in that city have an element of the bizarre to them and make the viewer wonder what those kids have been smoking, but also impress with their incisive perspective on the raw and rule-flouting behaviours of young partiers. I’m a few years out of regular Saturday evening partying myself, so I wondered what Edmonton’s drinking scene would look like as an outsider.

Drunk people can be unpredictable, so naturally I brought backup!

First post from me! It’ll be a quick one for now. My main photographic focus is street photography, and I’ve recently started exploring colour in graphic compositions. When people ask me what I like to take photos of I sometimes try to shock them by telling them I like to catch people picking their noses on street corners. It’s sort of true! But the point is not to take embarrassing photos, just to make honest representations of people in public environments. I want to capture candid moments of spontaneous human interaction. Partly it’s about documenting my time and place, but mostly it’s just because I like watching people and how they behave in urban environments.

Alex Webb is a photographer I admire who utilizes colour to maximum advantage. Saul Leiter is another. I don’t think I am anywhere close to achieving their complex colour compositions, but a guy’s gotta start somewhere.

Yellow Bars Blue

{Dec 16th Update} Continuing on with the public transit theme, I caught this one the other day.

Sunrise in the Underground