PatB Photography

When we were coming home from Langeoog after the Autumn half term holiday we had an hour or two spare in Bremen before going to the air port for the flight back to England.  Bremen railway station is not far from the the old town, so we locked our baggage in the at the station before going to explore.   It was a chance for me to do some street photography for which I took my 1Ds with 17-35mm lens.  A wide angle lens is ideal for street photography – I would really like to get a fast 21mm prime lens for this, well maybe one day

Going out with the sole purpose of street photography is not something I do very often but it is enjoyable to observe life and also good to get out of my comfort zone.  It is good practice for keeping your skills sharp for shooting weddings etc.

When I use my range finder film camera I pre-set the focus but on this occasion I used auto-focus with the lens wide open.  This is my only non-professional grade lens and is fairly slow meaning can only be opened up to f/3.5 to f/4, which caused real problems with low light making it impossible to shoot one handed where a much higher shutter speed is required.

Here are a few of my favourite shots from that short time walking around Bremen and vising a market place.  It was quite large but we were told that it was not the Christmas market despite the large merry-go-round, which is much bigger.

Just before we got to the old part of the town you have to cross a bridge over the river Weser.  This Turkish woman was begging on the bridge.

A few from the bridge looking up the river Weser.  The windmill is now a tea house, at least it used to be.

One of the street market stalls selling curry wurst (sausages) – yummy!

Another market stall in a section specialising in traditional trades.  This stall owner was making ornaments with glass, which was very interesting to watch.  Jon-Luke persuaded Imke to buy a glass Black Widow spider for him and he also chose a glass unicorn for Tara-Jane’s birthday.  By the time we got to market it was getting really dark and most shots from this point were shot at 1/30s at the highest ISO, which is really pushing the limits for using the camera hand-held so it always to pays to take several shots.  If you have an SLR a good tip is to put the camera in multi-picture mode and take three shots at a time – the centre shot is likely to be good as it doesn’t suffer from the mirror bounce – of course you still need to hold camera rock solid

As we were coming back out of the market we saw a magician performing some tricks, which caught Jon-Luke’s attention.  After he finished performing for a little girl, Jon-Luke gave some money and the magician starting finding money everywhere on Jon-Luke – in this case just behind the ear.  However what makes this shot interesting is the guy on the right walking by and watching the magician performing.

I then spotted this guy sitting on the top of the steps near by where the magician had been performing.  He caught my attention as he appeared to be waiting for somebody and made an interesting subject fitting in with the environment around him.

I don’t really know what this place was, it was located down a small dark alley way but guess it was for holding exhibitions or live performances.  The arrangements of lights attracted me due to the pattern, which seemed to be in harmony with the rhythm of the steps when viewed through the ultra-wide angle lens.

This piece of urban graffetti was on the other side of the road to the railway station, which can be seen in the distance on the left hand side of the picture.  Graffetti can be very artistic and this has a very strong message that strikes an accord with me and the infringement on our privacy and human rights by CCTV.  This should really be in the UK as we have many more of these than any other country in the world contributing in making us a facist police state.  Maybe it’s the irony of this that makes this strong statement stand out so much to me.

Check out the new police guidelines on street photography. - Added 8 January 2009.

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PatB

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