An Introduction

I thought with my first blogpost I might as well kick the door down to the well-guarded house of street photography.

I’ve been taking photos of people out on the streets for five years now. I started doing “street photography” more seriously back in 2020 when my job brought me downtown Dallas, just about four days of the week. In all truthfulness I had been going downtown Dallas about every two weeks on average, in the six months or so leading up to landing that job, to do photography and my level of interest had gradually started to switch from doing nighttime photography to photographing people. At that point I didn’t assume it to be street photography and in a lot of ways I still don’t. Especially not in the classic sense. I just became more and more interested in including people in my photos.

In addition to that back in 2017 I had rekindled my love for film photography, having been sacked away in a six year digital slump. In essence when I was going downtown to discover I had a great interest and undying affinity for the craft of street photography, or at a minimum my version of it, all the while not realizing which film suited me best.

Of course, all that has changed considerably in the span of just a few short, but very exciting years. What really sped things up for me was me deciding to do a street photography project in Deep Ellum, of Deep Ellum and its various characters. I haven’t looked back ever since. Can’t wait to see what photos the next few years will bring!

Although I did shoot black and white for a little while in Deep Ellum, I have always felt that color photography honored this particular project the most. Black and white is in many ways an abstraction of the truth which can be extremely powerful and beautiful on its own but I didn’t want my photos te be an abstracted version of reality. I want(ed) them to be real, raw and a truthful depiction of daily moments of the people who make up Deep Ellum.
Neither did I want to go back and forth between color or black and white because I felt and I still feel that both media require a different eye, a different approach and a different mindset altogether.

So when I learned about Kodak Vision3 250D after trying just about every color film I could get my hands on, including CineStill, and saw some of the results online, I absolutely had to give it a try. Initially, I wasn’t getting great results because I would always get either a green or a blue color cast on my scans. But, I knew that this film was capable of amazing results so I kept doing research and my research concluded with the knowledge that my development temperatures and chemistry were not correct for Vision3 films. After adjusting those two my first roll came out like a dream.
Even with the color casts I saw the massive potential of Kodak Vision3 films as a color street photography film but that first roll developed in the new chemicals with the new temperatures really sealed the deal for me.

I would say a close second for me is Fuji 400. Its 400 ISO speed is probably a bit more favorable for street photography but no film quite beats the tones, dynamic range, sharpness and versatility of Kodak Vision3 250D and couple those virtues with a great price and you’ve got yourself one heck of a street shooter.

Which color film do you like the best for street photography?

Needless to say that what film you shoot or which gear you bring to your scene of choice is secondary to the reason you’re out there and the results your efforts produce. So then, why am I out there? The answer is never as easy as the process itself of walking the streets and photographing people. I’d say in my case the response is twofold.

On the one hand I have my street portraits. I love capturing an individual whose life inextricably and undeniably shows on his/her face with an emotion of expression to match. I love capturing the inner emotion on the outer canvas when possible such as you see in the photo of the gentleman above. All I had to do was ask for a portrait and the shot came naturally. Those are the best. Even though the shot is staged, his emotion wasn’t. His emotion was as real as him standing in front of my camera which is exactly the reason why I subscribe to the thought that street portraits are genuine street photographs. They might not be street photography in the classical sense but a good street portrait tells you just as much about life on “said street” in that moment, of that person, as any candid photo.

Secondly, I do love great candid street moments which to me, in my humble opinion is a rather more ambitious type of street shot. It is an artful and crafty type photo which requires you to spend many hours on your stomping grounds learning to anticipate moments as you gain knowledge of the streets you endeavor to represent and to eternalize by the release of your shutter. At least, that is mostly the theory as they also take a measure of luck, in my experience. The more time you spend out there, i.e. the more you show up, the more luck you “create”. Street photography is 1/3rd showing up, 1/3rd vigilance and 1/3rd luck. The kind of street moments I’m after are what I call the holy trinity. There are three individual(s) aspects about the photo which happen to interact in an interesting way with each other. They wouldn’t make a great photo on their own but conceptually or photographically concomitant in a frame, to each other, they push the street photography needle to the max. I have not yet been able to take a shot in such capacity as they are rare. They come few and far between and the chase is in and of itself just as exciting as the end result.

The process itself is also a huge reason although to me very much secondary to the results. It’s fun to roam free out there walking the streets of Deep Ellum strapped with your favorite street photography camera, capturing a few portraits and trying to capture a great moment.