As you know, I currently shoot with an Nikon D7200 and Fuji XT3. The latter I prefer for my street photography, particularly given its size and quality, the former for my landscapes and seascapes. Sometimes I like to take both out with me, particulary in locations that are close to town centres, as it means I can get a bit of street photography and a bit of landscape all in one trip (lord knows time is so precious these days). The two types are shooting are very different, of course, and it takes a while to switch mindsets, but I do also find that one can feed into the other, particularly when I think about my compositions.
One thing I’d like to do more of over the coming year, is try to do more to capture the overall essence of a place. Rather than just capturing the coast, for example, or just capturing the town, try to build an overall picture of the place, build a story about it. Try to recreate the overall feeling and visuals of visiting a place. Bring together a more rounded picture I guess of the place I am visiting.
I tried to do this over the weekend, when I took a trip to Aylesford. Believe it or not, despite living in Kent the majority of my life, I’d never been to Aylesford before. I’ve seen loads of pictures of the bridge over the years, but never captured it myself. Feeling in a bit of a slump, I decided to go there and see somewhere different. But, conscious of the fact that it’s really just a bridge from a photography perspective, decided I should try to capture some street photography too and provide more of a rounded via of Aylesford, to get that kind of sense of a place.
Admittedly, it was quite tricky. Aylesford is a small place, it doesn’t have the range of compositions than the towns have across the county. As a result, it was difficult to find many interesting and unique shots to get a flavour of the town, the buildings and the people. Nonetheless, I gave it a go and came away with one or two shots that I was quite pleased with, to complement the standard shot of the bridge.
As I said, this is something I want to try to do more of…capture some shots of the local landscape or coastline, then complement it with some street photography to “complete the picture”. There are a few places I can think of where this will work really well in the county (eg Deal, Margate, Folkestone). Maybe Aylesford wasn’t the best place to do this, but maybe you find you look at these pictures and it does give you a sense of the place and the experience of walking around it. I’d be interested to hear what you think. Do you flit between genres? Try to use more than one genre of photography in one trip? Have you tried doing landscape and street photography in one trip? How do you try to capture the overall sense of a place? Do let me know in the comments.
