As an artist I'm not very good at sticking to just one thing. I thrive on learning and pushing myself to stretch in new ways. Over the last few months my goal has mostly to get out and shoot daily when possible, and feel comfortable with my camera so that I am not lost in the settings when a shot presents itself. I feel like I've been pretty successful with those goals. Looking back on August I took photos on 20 out of 31 days (fewer days than I expected) and shot a variety of subjects - mostly landscapes, but also flash photography, composite, long exposure, urban, street, sports, kids, a festival and macro.
Besides a goal to develop a larger artistic project, my current goal is to build confidence shooting street photography, specifically photographing strangers. This is sometimes easy and sometimes really hard, and is very emotional. It's also influenced by the interaction of race and privilege. As a white guy, I want to be sensitive of taking photographs of strangers, while not suffocating myself in lazy white guilt.
This morning's exercise was to go to the Farmer's Market and ask stall owners permission to shoot their stall. My experience was that everyone I asked was more than happy, and the one time I did not ask the owner asked me to not take photographs, which I did not.
Overall I was happy with the social experiment and intrigued to see what the images look like. And the end of the day, I was more interested in the human element than the quality of the images. In another post (or two) I'll write about other photography goals I have in mind.
