For a few months I have been toying with the idea of upgrading my camera, so I did a bit of overtime and as a birthday treat I took the plunge and bought myself the new camera. Yay!
Its a whole new experience that I wasn’t expecting and I have two little personal projects that I hope will improve on the images I currently capture.

One is a fifty-fifty-fifty: Fifty images with a fifty mm lens in fifty days.
My big concern here is that I might just take images that I am not particularly happy with and post snaps to keep up to date with the project rather than producing the best images that I can.
Something I found myself doing with my second 52 week project that i recently started and of which I have withdrawn from. It also wasn’t pushing me. Unlike my first 52 week project which was great.
It really challenged me, made me think about how to approach the weekly topic and gave me a reason to use my first grown up camera rather than it sitting and gathering dust.

So a 50-50-50!!

I want to think about it and try to approach it with a mixture of some planning and some experimenting. I think, I hope, it will help a considerably in developing my composition skills.

The other thing I want to do, is finish the ‘One Hundred Candid Strangers’ project that I am half way through. I’ve read a bit about street photographers using 35 and 50mm lenses and I thought I’d use the 50mm lens to finish this project off but I’m not so sure that is going to happen.

I tried to capture a few people with my new set up and really struggled. The following two images where taken on a Canon 6D with a Canon 50mm lens.

In both cases I just could not get close enough to the subjects to feel a hundred percent sure that they are really suitable to be added to my strangers project. I’m guessing that it will be easier in crowded areas such as buy markets and shopping streets rather than these quiet locations in Potsdam and The River Spree in Germany.

I’ll give it a go but think I will need to use a mix of focal lengths to get the strangers project completed.

I’m told that the isolation of the subjects and the space in both images adds a sense of melancholy.
Not what I set out to achieve and it has also given me a new appreciation of how personal some street photographers actually get.

As always, your opinions are welcome.

Kind regards,

Jim Jimmy James.