Key West Street Photo

Whoa! I said to myself, that's a hell of a mural. And it is.

There is this annoying movement among hip photographers trying to define street and documentary photography and holding anguished online sessions discussing what is street photography and wringing their hands. The experienced YouTube voices reassure the hoi polloi that you don't need the latest and greatest equipment. "Use what you have!" they exhort encouragingly even as the reviewers and sellers extol the virtues of the latest and greatest cameras and lenses and stuff. I hunt down the famous decisive moment and blow it just slightly. I should have caught the cyclist at the apex of the "V" below.

In this one the rider has a plastic bag of something but he's holding it on the wrong side of his body, silly man, away from my modest super zoom camera but I still took the shot because I like it.

And so it goes. Looking back over this page with all the horrid early low quality digital camera pictures, small with terrible image quality and feeble night shots and ghastly white balance, I reckon i was doing, or trying to do street photography before it was a fashion.  I surprise myself.

Mostly my old girl Cheyenne the portly Labrador-grandmother in my life was my street subject lumbering through my pictures. But I was documenting the streets because it was fun. And something to do and I knew Key West was transmogrifying before my eyes. And so I took pictures. 

I still find things I love to photograph and apparently people like to look at them so I guess we can call Key West photogenic. Occasionally I glance at Instagram and look at the #keywest page and I end up after a few short minutes getting blurry eyed from the abundance of identical selfies and sunsets.

This is a small place but every street has its quirks and charms and I like taking pictures of those quirks and charms. Some of the noisiest voices on the Internet insist street photos must include people and if possible people and places must tell a  story. I understand that imperative in a  one photo moment on Instagram or Flickr but with my open ended format I often take pictures thinking ahead to what I shall write and I have no idea if that is street photography or documentary photography or something else.

I live deliberately outside the mainstream so I guess it's okay if I pootle around at the bottom of the peninsula that is Florida and limit myself to doing my own thing. God knows that's what I have been doing for ages so I might as well keep on keeping on. But I remain fascinated by the outside world's requirement that everything be categorized and labeled and archived. I see desperate amateur photographers asking the career experts "How do I get inspiration? What do I photograph?" And the answer is always find a theme, get inspired by others or just take pictures. Perhaps I am simply lucky that people like to look at Key West, especially my town which is not the one you will see anywhere else. But even if no one were looking I'd still be trying to get better at capturing the images I think I see. 

Take pictures. Post them. Have fun. I want to see other people enjoying photography without labels in their own home towns. Everyone has a camera in their pockets and there must be more to look at than faces and sunsets. I'm sure of it, even if its not strictly street photography.