Street Photography portraiture at the Sunday Market

Summertime Blues and other colours

A lot of people look forward to the summer time for various reasons, such as having some time off from work and being able to enjoy better weather. The better weather and the longer days meaning that it is possible to go out and do more things than you are able to do during the wintertime. In some ways, it is the other way round for me during the summertime because I work during the summer in a camping site and I won’t get any time off until October. Working six days a week it becomes quite difficult to find the time and the energy to go out and shoot some photos with my Sony NEX-6 camera. I often find that at the end of a shift of working I’m quite tired or very hungry and all I want to do is to get home and to scratch whichever itch needs scratching. Quite often it will be a case of getting some food and then some snoozing time on the sofa! Last Sunday though, was a good day because I went out to the market and I hung around with my camera amongst all of the people and the fruit and vegetables.

My photographic plan for the market

I had to make a choice between the wide-angle 16mm lens and my 55 to 210 mm zoom lens. With the wide-angle lens I’m able to take pictures of people close up and sometimes they don’t know that I am taking the picture because it is such a wide angle being captured. On the other hand, I can use my zoom lens in a situation like at the market and not necessarily be noticed because people are busy looking at the goods and other people around the market. For this particular trip to the market I decided to go with the long lens and my aim was to do close-up portrait street photography with getting in as close as possible to faces. It turned out to be a particular good choice and the only problem I had was a Moroccan market trader waving at me because he didn’t seem to like having his photo taken. I waved back to him and I moved to somewhere else. I spent a couple of hours, maybe less, taking photos and I was quite pleased with the results when I got back home and put them into Aperture on the iMac. I also did take a few photos of the produce available on sale by themselves as well as the colourful fruits and vegetables being included in my street portraits. See more Spondicious photos on Flickr.

[Tweet “Wide angle or Zoom – What’s your preference.”]

Sitting at the water fountain in the St. Feliu de Guixols marketplace

I bumped up the ISO on the NEX-6 camera even though it was quite sunny because some of the shots that I took, the subjects were in the shade provided by the stalls of the market. This also allowed me to get a fairly high shutter speed while I was shooting in aperture priority mode. There was a guy sitting on a stool in amongst the fruit boxes and the crates and he was just looking around, not working terribly hard. Maybe he had done as much selling for the day as he wanted to. He was just lazily looking around at people in the market and was a perfect subject for some street portraiture. At first I did have the camera set to take multiple shots on pressing the button and this can be quite useful when people are moving, but I found that I didn’t really need it so I turned that feature off.

Although it is possible to stay in one place and wait for the people to go past, which is good if you have a particularly good background to work with, I do like to have a wander around and to find new positions. When I do this I end up with a more varied set photos than if I was to stay in one place. What I was looking for was to find expressive faces that were going to give me an interesting story to tell with the photo. These sorts of expressions tend to occur more when there are two or more people together taking part in a conversation. I saw that there were two old guys having a chat animatedly using their hands as part of the conversation and I was very pleased with the photos I got of these fellas.

Old fella in Market

What! Very little or no postprocessing?

My photos were getting uploaded to Google automatically and I found that a number of the photos were good enough that I didn’t need to crop them or to fiddle with them in any way. All I did was to add a few words to the picture and posted them to various places in Google+. Street Hunters Community is a good place to send some Street photos. Usually I like to do some postprocessing in order to give the photos more umph and power. With a good number of these photos taken in the market I didn’t feel the need to work on them further in Intensify Pro or even use some of the tools available within the editing facilities in Google+. I did crop a couple of the photos where there was a person or even just somebody’s elbow poking into the shot in order to tidy things up slightly.

Fish seller in market