This past Monday was spent in Cambridge, all the elements (weather, light, etc) were in place for a perfect day of street photography or so I thought, you’ll find out that the most important element wasn’t in place, spoiler it was me.
I should say that I did have a wonderful and fun day on the streets, I meet up with my good friend Zahyrc and we ended up having so much fun shooting together, at one point he asked me if I had anything good, to which I replied, that’s like asking Henri Cartier Bresson if he got anything good (insert red face here). I decided to shoot the day using my newly replaced Fujifilm 23 F2 WR lens, I was on the look for shadows and photos that would look great in Monochrome. I set my lens to 1.5 meters using range focusing (or so I thought) and to F8. I’ve done this many times before and never had any problems getting photos in focus, however, today would be different, it all went tits up and I didn’t notice until I was back at home going through the photos on my MacBook.
Arriving in Cambridge nice early to take full advantage of the autumn light, I started shooting before I’d even left the train station. I decided to walk straight to Cambridge market, at this time of the year the market has wonderful light and great spots of shadows that allow for powerful street photos, like the one below:
Walking into Cambridge city center I found a few scenes that I knew would make good street photos, Regent-street early in the morning has great light on the left side of the main road, there are many doorways and shop windows and I love to walk this way into the city center as I always get something good.
Here’s the thing, at no point in the day did I think to check the photos, you know to make sure they were in focus. I just took it upon myself that I knew what I was doing and I (almost) never get it wrong, boy was I wrong today and not even just a little bit wrong, out of all the photos taken I got 6 in focus and this was just pure luck.
I guess I’m writing this blog so that you can see that it doesn’t always go right, every one of us will have bad days with our photography, I still ended up having a great fun day and isn’t that the point. Remember to not get pissed off, learn from your mistakes and move on. When I got home and saw the photos I couldn’t stop laughing at myself, I felt like a right tit. Now there is one thing I didn’t do, yes you might have guessed it, I still haven’t told Zahyrc guess he’ll find out when he reads this blog and I can almost guarantee he won’t stop taking the piss.
I’ve posted the photos I did get in focus below, enjoy
