Welcome

I’ve always been interested in photography for years but last year, something clicked for me. I now bring my camera almost everywhere I go and even when I don’t, I often find I am looking at how to compose an image. As I tell my step-daughter Charlie, you can always go ‘click’ with you brain. I’m very new still and thought it would be fun (for me anyways) to document what I’m going through with photography.

I’m mostly drawn to street photography, although living in the Vancouver area there are lots of beautiful landscapes and wildlife. I work in an office in downtown Vancouver, and part of my practice is to go out shooting street shots during my lunch break. I also mostly shoot in black and white. I have a digital camera I use that I have set to show black and white, so I am not usually ever seeing what a photo looks like in colour.

Shooting in black and white makes sense to me right now. I often get overwhelmed with editing colour photos and spend longer than I’d like on an image. I often end up with an end product that doesn’t line up with what I had in my head when I started. Right now, black and white makes it easier for me to focus on other compositional elements like shapes, lines, space, layers etc.

The other thing I’ve really connected with photography this year has been the quick turnaround time from idea to release. The ability to take a photo, do a quick minimal edit, and post it online and move on has been really fun.

I’m a musician and have been playing for nearly 40 years (I did it for my full time job for a number of years). I love music but I was getting increasingly frustrated with how long it took an idea to turn into a song. From an idea, to arranging, to recording, mixing, re-mixing, sitting on it for a year second guessing myself and then finally releasing, it was taking me so long to get things out (more on that in a future post I expect). With photography, I’ve been able to put something out into the world within the day, and it’s been really rewarding.

Owen