Every now and then I like to give myself challenges with photography.
Last weekend, I challenged myself to take out a small camera and only one lens for some indoor street photography at the Pickering Flea Market in Ontario. This market is like a little world bazaar – full of random cheap merchandise, one of a kind vendors, many ethnicities and interesting characters.
I grabbed my new Olympus Pen-F and the Olympus M.Zuiko 17mm f1.8. I chose a prime lens rather than a zoom, since it would force me to get closer to my subjects and frame by walking instead of twisting a zoom ring. To make this challenge even more difficult, I restricted myself to shooting JPG’s in the camera’s black and white mode. Olympus created a good approximation of Kodak Tri-X 400 and since I like the look of that film, I thought it would be fun to use this mode exclusively. In some ways, this approach is like shooting with a fixed lens rangefinder camera. Forcing myself to visualize and shoot in black and white, takes me back to my twenties, when I shot 35mm B&W film in the streets of Toronto.
I wanted to put the fun back into photography and not worry about carrying around a bunch of gear or messing around with RAW files in Adobe Lightroom. Indeed it was heaps of fun and quite satisfying. It makes one appreciate the basics and pay more attention to the world around you than your equipment and technology.
