Thomas is a professional fine art photographer and writer specialising in photography related instructional books as well as travel writing and street photography.
As the last vestiges of summer have now long faded away, my favourite time of the year for photography has come. I love Autumn, and indeed winter, for shooting street photography, because of the light. The low sun here in Ireland creates a beautiful golden character to the light and as the season turns from Autumn to Winter, and the sun gets lower, you get beautiful long deep shadows.
I recently set about testing my new(ish) Sony 16-70 mm lens out for street photography, and I decided to film it for another episode of Street Photo Diary. I was also trying out a new GoPro to film the POV shots. I had previously used an old GoPro Hero Session to do these, but the quality wasn’t great and the battery, which can’t be replaced, would only last about a half an hour (after a few years of use).
I haven’t really been taking that many photos over the past few months for various reasons, which has been a bit frustrating for me. I do have a little collection that has been slowly gathering over the past few months, and so it’s time to resurrect a long-running series, that I used to do ages ago: “Random Acts of Photography”.
I have just uploaded a new episode of Street Photo Diary to my YouTube channel. In this episode of Street Photo Diary, I get back to shooting Street Photography with my trusty Sony A6000. I talk about how this 8 year old camera is still my favourite street photo camera, and my preferred lens and settings when shooting street photography. I also discuss 5 tips for beginners looking to get into street photography.
As spring gives way to summer here in Ireland, and the cold dark rainy days give way to bright rainy days, I’ve been slowly getting back into street photography. I have only really dabbled since the pandemic began and for most of 2020 I didn’t really shoot much at all. I’ve been getting back into it bit by bit, and recently, I headed out with my trusty Sony A6000 to get some street shots
This video is a complete and mostly unedited recording of my whole editing process of editing a street photography shoot in Lightroom. I go through the whole process from culling shots in the Library module to editing the photos in the develop module. It’s also kind of like a video podcast, in that I talk (ramble) through my process.
Street Photo Diary is back! After a long hiatus, I’m back with a brand new episode of “Street Photo Diary”. This time I’m out on the streets of Dublin with the Panasonic Lumix GF1 high was my very first mirrorless camera.
After the incident I had the last time I was out shooting Street Photography, I have been finding it hard to get back to shooting. The attack put me off wanting to do street photography at all, having both shattered my confidence and also my motivation. But slowly I’ve ben trying o make myself get back out there, and this Saturday, I finally did my first street shoot in a while.
In the latest edition of “Street Photo Diary” I decided to try shooting street photography on film. I dusted off my somewhat temperamental Yashica FX-D and headed into Dublin City to get some shots.
Back in June I spent a week in New York, and while I was there I didn’t do much photography, as I was mainly there for a holiday, and also I was recovering from a bad chest infection that I had had the previous month. Even so, I couldn’t resist the call of the camera, so I still managed to get some shots in.
Back in May of this year, I had gone out to shoot an episode of the Street Photo Diary video series. I shot the stills, and I even had the go-pro attached to record the camera’s point of view, but something came up so I never got to record the accompanying pieces to camera and so never finished the video. As a result, I never did anything with the photos from that day, and they kind of got lost among other projects and I forgot about them, until today when I found them again.
A while ago I posted an episode of my ongoing “Street Photo Diary” video series on YouTube shot with the original Fuji X-100. The video has attracted quite a few comments, but one recently stood to to me and got me interested. Someone wanted to know could you achieve similar results with an iPhone. I figured you would get broadly similar results, but the quality wouldn’t be quite the same. I was curious to see though, so I set off to find out.
In the latest episode of Street Photo Diary, I’m once again shooting with my favourite street photo camera, the Sony A6000. I ask if its still worth buying one in 2019 and head out to shoot on the first proper day of Summer here in Ireland.
Summer finally arrived in Ireland last week. It only lasted for a day or two, but we enjoyed it while it lasted! It’s actually been really cold so far through most of June, but we did have a few hot days, and so I headed out to see how people were enjoying the sunshine.
I hadn’t had a chance to shoot some street photography in nearly a month, so I was happy to get out and shoot again. I wanted to try and practice and change up the way I shoot a bit, especially for street photography. I wanted to focus on things like shadows, and reflections, and be on the look out for something different to the type of things I normally shoot. I wasn’t hugely successful in changing my habits, but I still got a couple of shots I’m really happy with.
It’s time for a brand new season of my “Street Photo Diary” series. Following on from the photo essay I posted earlier, I set out to shoot some street photos with a Sony A6000 on a beautiful spring day in Dublin City. I also talked about the settings that I use and the importance of capturing "mundane" subjects when shooting Street Photography.
Spring has arrived in the city with an unusually warm couple of days, and it really showed on the faces of the people as they went about their daily lives. The ever changing beat of the city seemed more alive, and everyone from the tourists to the locals seemed to be enjoying the nice weather.
As a companion to the recently published Issue 36 of Street Photo Diary, I also shot another episode of the companion video series of the same name. It’s hard to believe that I’ve done ten of these now, and when I look back, they’ve really come a long way since my first attempts. In this episode I go searching for the winter light in Dublin city with my Fuji X-Pro 2 as my main camera.
Having repaired the detached mirror on my original Canon 5D I headed out onto the streets of Dublin city to do some street photography and test out the newly repaired camera.
As much as I love shooting street photography, I often find myself wondering about the ethics of it. I generally shoot candid street photography, as I believe that this is a more representative form of the art, in my opinion. While there’s nothing wrong with taking photos of people in public, at least according to the law, I do sometimes question if it’s right or not.