Welcome

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

I’m mostly drawn to street photography, although Vancouver is known for 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 always shoot in black and white. My camera is set to show black and white only, so I often don’t ever see what my photos look like in colour.

Shooting in black and white makes sense to me right now. I would often get overwhelmed with editing colour photos and spend longer than I wanted on an image. My colour photos in the end just didn’t match what I had in my head. Right now, black and white makes it easier for me to focus on other compositional elements like shapes, lines, space and layers.

The other thing I’ve really connected with 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 or an album. 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 too 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