Getting the Shot - thoughts

I recently got back into photography, specifically shooting the streets of Amsterdam. I've called the city home for just over two years now and it's been a constant source of creative inspiration for me. I consider myself a bit of a "creative drifter" I've dabbled in all sorts of art forms unsuccessfully. Creative coding is fun but ultimately kind of a dead end when I'm already getting paid to sit in front of my computer for 8 hours a day. I cycled through a few analog forms like drawing, linocut printing, riso printing, cyanotypes. These are all interesting but there's a massive skill curve to getting good at drawing, something I've never really been good at.

It struck me as I was back home with my parents over the Christmas break, I really used to love photography.

Something I guess I never considered as an art form, for myself personally. I grew up with access to a digital camera and I enjoyed the form for it's ability to capture a moment, one that's long passed. As a child, I was constantly concerned with time passing me by, especially during the summers where it felt that each passing one flew by faster than the last. I saw photography as the fastest way to checkpoint my feelings at a given time. Random photographs I took 10+ years ago still bring me back to that exact state of mind, as a journal entry would do.

I kind of have a shit memory, I rely heavily on digital notes and agendas to keep my daily life running and having a phone in my pocket made capturing these details just as easy. I have pictures of every college class schedule on my phone, something I even made my phone background so I wouldn't forget to get up for an 8am lab.

Back in Kansas, my Mom was digitizing and uploading a lot of old camera photos. Her sister recently lost her home in latest California fires, including all of their photos of their kids, so my mother was collecting up any photos with my cousins. I realized just how many photos I took with the family camera, on road trips, at birthday parties, at funerals, I always managed to grab the camcorder and make a recording of something I though was interesting.

One of the first photography projects I remember doing was putting a cheap digital camera on a kite and trying to record what our house looked like from above. I found my sister's old Sony HX90V, a pocketable point and shoot with a good zoom lens and bought it from her. After all I had some much more interesting surroundings to document than 10 acres of grass in rural Kansas.

The HX90 was great for a few days, difficult to shoot in any overcast or dark lighting, but it provided a good challenge. By some miracle, I ended up getting some magical shots that really sparked my joy of photography again. But this was short lived as each time I went out I couldn't grab the moments I was seeking to capture. Its lack of fast auto focus and relatively large f-stop meant I had to stand still for much to long to capture little, authentic gestures between people.

I ended up buying a Fujifilm X100VI, miraculously one was in stock and I decided to jump on it. After all, what's the point in having adult money if you can't be a little frivolous with it. My first outing with the camera was like taking a manual car out for a spin: blurry photos, over exposed, somehow shooting in 12,800 ISO accidentally. I managed to capture a few good shots, but by this point I was already hooked.

A few YouTube videos later, I re-learned the shutter speed, aperture, ISO triangle, made a few passes through the settings menu, familiarized myself with the dials and short cuts. The next time I went out over my lunch break I got a few more good shots, ones where I would sit and stare at them for a solid minute when reviewing them on my laptop.

That same week on Saturday, I found myself in the middle of a massive Kurdistan march in Amsterdam, taking photos with my brand new camera. It unlocked something special, with a smile and a wave, I could take anyone's photo. Capturing soft moments between mothers and their children, brothers holding a banner and laughing, despite the ongoing violence that their people were experiencing back home in Syria.

I chatted with one of the organizers, who I later forwarded my photos to, who was happy to see people outside of the Kurdish community in Amsterdam simply showing up. My interest, by proxy of my camera, allowed me to have a conversation that I don't think I would have been able to have otherwise.

Holding a real camera up and taking photographs really signals to the world that you're serious and engaged with your subject matter. In reality, I was kind of terrified of taking photos of people, almost all of my iPhone photography tries to avoid capturing faces, focusing more on places, lighting and architecture. But with a "real" camera people weirdly let their guard down.

This is really the magic of street photography to me: capturing and documenting these infinitesimally small moments. Pure authenticity, moments that can't be posed or staged. It's been healing for me too, allowing me to live vicariously through my lens.