An outing with the age-old smartphone on a street shoot at the local Sunday morning Farmers Market, a vibrant community space where local farmers sell fresh produce and other goods directly to consumers, a chance to capture a candid moment of everyday life in a public space, and an opportunity to focus on people and their interactions within their urban environment.
Doing so, in a genre that emphasizes spontaneity and authenticity, often portraying people in their natural environments without staging or intervention, calls for quick and unobtrusive shooting, normally with cameras fitted with wide-angle lenses to capture more of the scene without drawing attention. There are also times when an opportunity arises, when a shot can be taken from within the scene itself. An advantage, of course, is to use a mobile or a smartphone for the shoot.
Borne from the works that can be traced back to the 19th century when artists like Charles Nègre began documenting urban life, and early practitioners like André Kertész used portable cameras to capture spontaneous scenes in Paris. Though having its roots alongside photojournalism, street photography is now a distinct form of artistic expression, separate from traditional documentary photography due to its emphasis on personal interpretation and aesthetic choices rather than strict narrative guidelines.
For the budding photographer with an eye for spontaneity and incidentals, street photography is not necessarily constrained to the streets or urban settings alone; it may go far beyond that. The genre invites photographers to explore their surroundings with curiosity and creativity, capturing moments that might otherwise go unnoticed. This approach fosters a unique connection between the photographer and their environment, encouraging an ongoing dialogue about perception and representation in visual art.
The market at our local is a weekly affair, none too big, with only a row of stalls displaying their produce and staples along a precinct street closed to vehicular traffic. Activities start at the crack of dawn, with the crowd growing as the morning lingers until it peters out about mid-morning when the stalls close and the clean-up begins.
As the genre is the documentation of human experience in various contexts, the ubiquitous smartphone, with its wide-angle lens, is all you need to start with. Mine, which was put to good use for this short, is an age-old HMD Nokia 3.1, an entry-level Android smartphone released in 2018 by HMD Global.
