Tough to process
Yesterday I took my camera and my courage firmly in both hands and decided to explore a relatively unknown part of my local village (in the foothills of the central Italian Apennines). The conditions were not great, bright blue sky and really contrasty, but my main aim was simply to try and overcome my shyness, in the hopes that just walking around with my camera would help boost my self-confidence, literally step by step. I have a very long way to go. I did though come back with a few images that seemed worth processing… but there “casca l’asino” as they say in Italian (literally, “the donkey falls down”, poor thing, roughly translatable as “that’s where the problems begin”). Whereas with my landscape or nature images, processing flows relatively easily from my “vision” to my fingertips, I find that with my street images, I flounder. I just don’t know where to begin.
My instinct is to convert them immediately to B&W and that may well be the best solution in many, if not most, cases.
But I feel that before going down that route, I need first to understand better how colour works (or doesn’t) in what is for me a very new genre, but one I’m ever more enthusiastic to explore.
Another of my goals is to be less obsessed with perfection (not that I’ve ever got anywhere near it) and be more spontaneous, in an attempt to look at my everyday surroundings with the eyes of someone from another place, or even another time. Always keeping in mind that one person’s familiar and “boring” may well be another person’s novel and interesting.
I started from the main street…
… before turning down one of the numerous side streets where, to use a clichéd but apt expression, time seems to have stood still. More or less.
In this part of the village, there are still a lot of houses in need of renovation and I did take quite a few images of semi-ruins, but the light wasn’t right and I ended up binning most of them. I’ll be going back.
I had been hoping to include more people in my shots, but actually the streets were pretty deserted, much less stressful, but not ideal for my self-confidence building. In the end, the only living creature I ended up photographing was this “guard dog”, an image snatched in passing before his barking alerted half the neighbourhood to my presence.
Reflecting on my experience, I believe that a small village may well be one of the most difficult contexts possible for a shy street photographer. I’m pretty sure that a more extrovert approach could yield some amazing images of some of the local characters who would probably be all too willing to oblige, but I fear that is just not me… at least not in the here and now. I yearn for the relative anonymity of a big city, but I will be persisting. You never know.
Adapted from an article first published in The 617 Club.
For my Italian-speaking friends (or anyone wanting to translate into another language), I recommend DeepL translator available clicking here or also as a browser extension for Google Chrome.
Per i miei amici di lingua italiana (o chiunque voglia tradurre in un’altra lingua), consiglio DeepL translator disponibile cliccando qui o anche come estensione per il browser Google Chrome.