I was starting to realise that photography had the potential of becoming a quite expensive hobby.
So I started reading up on entry level DSLR's, the big decision was which manufacturer to shake hands with as the 'glass' would not work across brands, so once you started investing money in new lenses it would be difficult to switch allegiances.
'Glass' it took me a while to realise that was a term for lenses. This was one term amongst a myriad of others that caused me grief. Another big one was 'IQ' which kept cropping up in various forums, I eventually realised and by realised I mean google searched and found it to simply mean 'image quality'.
Out of the big two of Canon and Nikon I favoured Canon as that was my father-in-law's camera of choice and I had ideas of borrowing his lenses and his knowledge of the functions.
I finally decided to go with Pentax, as my wife had bought a decent 55-300 telephoto lens for our safari holiday a few years ago and it seemed to make sense as I would no doubt use that a lot.
Worth noting that to date I have never used that lens in any other way than just trying it out, although an upcoming trip to Canada may change that.
Pentax also had the advantage of a huge back catalogue of film camera lenses that would work to some degree on the DSLR.
I finally settled on the Pentax Kr model as it reviewed really well, came with a decent kit lens and was under £400.
It was around this time that I first heard about street photography, it was in one of the online forums and I think the thread was discussing how to have the guts to do it. There were no photos in the thread but the tone of the chat interested me, it seemed to suggest an adrenalin buzz could be had from photography.
Being a keen mountain biker I had my doubts that such a buzz could be achieved from just taking photographs so I decided to take a trip to Cheltenham town centre and see for myself.
I don't remember the trip being particularly eventful, I was still learning how to use the camera. I knew nothing of aperture, shutter speeds, iso etc. I was probably using 'P' or full auto and taking photos of benches and graffiti. Whenever I tried to take a photo of a scene or of anyone interesting I just froze.
The only 'street shot' that I still have from that trip is this one.
Again not worthy of anyone's time to look at really, I still didn't know what street photography was all about.
It was again taken from distance and then some awful filter added to it to spice it up a bit.
One point of interest is that the girl stood on the right looking at the camera was someone I'd seen earlier in the day. She looked quite interesting and I was plucking up the courage to take a photo, as soon as I lifted the camera she sensed what I was doing and stared straight at me and I bottled it. I started pointing the camera around at random objects hoping that she'd think I hadn't been taking her photograph. Whenever I looked at her she just stared straight back almost daring me to try something, I backed down and walked away.
Now when I took the photo above I was really looking at the three people at the stall and didn't even notice the stary girl was there. So when I was post processing the image at home later I had a quite a shock and I have to say a little thrill at having caught her on film, not quite the ghost from 'Three men and a baby' but still.
This outing did therefore teach me a few things
- Taking photos without permission is scary
- People have a 6th sense when it comes to cameras
- The image captured by the camera is not the same as what your eyes see
- I needed to do some research on street photography
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