Toronto Walks. Part 1. Lights And Shadows - A Glimpse At One Block
From my iPhone Street Photography Challenge
I’m a portrait photographer, a people photographer. People are what I shoot the best and what I love shooting the best. Street photography though is a genre that turned out to be quite challenging for me lately. Even though I have a street photography background and used to shoot a lot of street before, I kind of abandoned this genre for a while, and the results were an unexpected anxiety while thinking about going out for a photo walk and capture all those nothing-pictures.
Street photography is a genre that can be both exciting and challenging. It involves taking candid photos, and it requires a quick eye, a steady hand, and the ability to capture moments that happen in an instant. As a portrait photographer, I am thriving in a calmer and more controlled environment where no-one is in a rush, and there is enough time to develop your ideas. Street photography seems to be almost the opposite. But not really.
Street photography is a great way to step out of your comfort zone and challenge yourself to see the world in a different way. To become quicker to see. And to see as a photograph, almost as a movie scene.
So in this post, I would love to share some of the photos from my Toronto Black And White iPhone Photography challenge. It’s a personal creative challenge when I don’t actually have excuses to not shoot, such as, “My camera is not with me”, because our smartphones have cameras too, and many of them have quite decent cameras, and our smartphones are always with us.
So it seemed like a perfect scenario — a personal ongoing street photography challenge when I shoot everything within this series on an iPhone. So, this post will mark the beginning of this series, and likely, there will be more on that.
And sometimes, you don’t even need to go far searching for locations as you can shoot something creative even within one block. This series was shot almost from the same spot, and it captures a few scenes on the same street, in front of one of the local stores. I decided to challenge myself this way — to shoot a mini-story on one little spot. In this case, I was also using the game of light and shadows that you can get during the golden hour. So enjoy — a little story on one street of Toronto.
Street photography is a genre that can be challenging (at least, for me it is!), but it's also a great way to step out of your comfort zone and see the world in a different way. The iPhone camera is a great tool for getting into the habit of shooting regularly and experimenting with different angles and compositions. The series of black and white iPhone street photography in Toronto was a rewarding project that allowed me to capture the city's energy and beauty in a unique way. Whether you're a beginner or an experienced photographer, street photography is a genre worth exploring.