Street (sign) photography
Travelling to distant and beautiful places is great. Bringing a camera and taking photos of those places is even better. Sydney (where I already am) is a beautiful place and has enough scenery to keep your camera occupied for years. When travelling, I try to have my camera on hand the whole time and snap photos wherever I can. But taking boring photos of interesting places is easy - and these photos are often good - because the subject does all of the heavy lifting, interest-wise. It’s a useful challenge to sometimes go out to take photos of scenery that isn’t beautiful. Interesting light can strike anything, even a rusty street sign. You don’t want to become de-sensitised to scenery.
On a day when I go out to take pictures like this I’ll aim for a suburb and wander around taking pictures until I’m satisfied. Or bored. Or asked to leave. The focus of these sessions is to make interesting photos from the more mundane parts of the city, to show that anything can be made into a good photo. I think this sort of process helps me take better pictures. Sometimes, it takes a couple of passes for the interest to jump out.
A Merging Traffic sign, near Darling Harbour in Sydney, announces to drivers that their ramps are joining forces to form the start of the Western Distributor. I drive past this sign a lot. Enough that it’s become The Sign. Normally I pass right below The Sign, and as you go underneath you can see the way the two ramps form a frame with nothing but beautiful blue sky in the background. Here’s the view from road. The Sign is right in the middle - you can’t miss it.
Look at those leading lines. The perspective. How the eye is drawn towards The Sign. Every time I drove by I thought it’d make a nice photo. It took way too many trips for me to notice the a walkway to the left of the road, running right underneath The Sign.
But once I did, it was on.
Once you know you could get the photo, it then becomes about how you can get the best version of that photo. You scope out how exactly to get to that walkway, and if you’d have to lean over the railing to get a good view. You wait for some sunny summer weather with a clear blue sky. You leave in the morning, when the sunlight points west, towards The Sign. You make sure your lens is wide enough to get everything in shot. You expose for the sky, and enjoy the blocking from the shadows.
And finally, when everything falls in place, you get a photo:
A well-executed plan
A lot of interesting photographs of mundane objects appear only a a particular point in time. Often what makes them interesting is not a permanent feature in the way that a stunning landscape or sunset are consistently photogenic. Photography that’s more non-structured and exploratory is part of the point, for me. That being said, if conditions aren’t great when I go out I’ll sometimes come back for a second pass on a nicer day. I’m not above some preparation for better photographers.
On the day, I couldn’t justify getting all the way out of the house for just one photo - my “wander around until I’m done” instinct was too strong. I ended up wandering around for a while, through Ultimo, the Powerhouse Museum (RIP), and the new developments around the Convention Center. Some of them are in my Sydney gallery. I couldn’t top the picture of The Sign, though.