Street snap!

Another London Street Photography Meetup, another street market and the mayhem and mess has me stumped! My strategy to deal with all the visual noise is to simplify with monochrome but Polly has set up a doozy of a challenge, and colour is key.

 

Firstly we have to find reoccurring colour in multiple people, this has me stalking people wearing red or pink, and to a lesser extent, blue, which doesn’t look odd at all! The guy in the red and black tracksuit was rather mellow enjoying a herbal cigarette but I wasn’t too sure how much he’d enjoyed being captured on camera – gulp!

 

 

Polly’s second challenge was to throw matching patterns in the mix, and then when our heads were about to explode – she added human/not-human (for example, man vs. mannequin!) Well, to look on the bright side I didn’t have the 350+ shots to scrutinise like last week, but instead less than 50 to peruse. However, two thirds of my efforts got binned pretty sharpish and this is all that remains!

 

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Whittling down West Wittering

 

 

 

 

It's taken me a while to whittle down my 300+ West Wittering photographs from my 40th London Street Photography Meetup. It seems apt to select 40 photos, and then to cherry-pick from those to meet the challenges.

 

 

 

 

 

 

We started with a story of East Head aiming to capture a nature element, a people element, a man-made element and a close-up element. The bonus fifth element was seagull. I was surprised how seagull-free the day was, normally they circle above Polly's head but after much lurking I found a couple of the noisy scavengers, but I think I had more success with a dog element!

 

 

 

 

Then we split into three teams (go team "Life's a beach, and then you shoot!", catchy-eh?) to collaborate over a frame, a reflection, a beach hut and a still life. We were fortunate Ben's godmother Mary allowed us to explore (and thankfully shelter in) her lovely number 18 beach hut!

 

 

 

Finally, dodging the somewhat idiosyncratic British weather we hit the beach pondering the theme "together but alone" and amazingly, enjoy a bit of a gloomy, and then glorious enormous skies sunset.

 

 

 

 

After a hearty refuel we threw ourselves on the mercy of the sheer shoulder-shrugging insouciance of Southern Trains. Who, in their wisdom, have generally abandoned timetables in favour of a more haphazard pot-luck approach where you board a mystery train which could take you closer to home, or to an entirely new surprise destination. And they don't charge extra for that joy!

 

 

 

 

It was a sensational seaside adventure indeed, a fabulous potpourri of photography opportunities, old friends, new friends, Ben's wonderful godmother Mary, and even with the unexpected randomness of the British weather, and buckets full of laughs too.

 

 

 

 

I thoroughly enjoy the experience of the wilds of West Wittering and looking forward to seeing everyone's photos, and see Polly make some sense of the sheer volume of our collective output. Good luck with that, Polly!

 

 

 

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