More Than Useless: 2013 Project 52, Week 3

Week 3: January 15-21

16mm (DX) : ISO 400 : f/8 : 1/50s
"All You Need" at the Love Statue

This was my last weekend with the wide angle Sigma lens before I had to return it to the good folks at BorrowLenses; we spent one of our last days together in the eminently walkable downtown/City Hall/Chinatown area of Philadelphia.

I've been thinking a bit about what constitutes my style of photography, or less formally, "what I like to shoot". Experimenting with the wide angle lens has certainly piqued an interest in landscape/architecture photos, which is a vast improvement over the previously-felt mild dread and frustration when attempting such photos with a 35mm on a crop body (equivalent to 52mm). But ultimately I find that having people somewhere in the frame provides some human context to the scene that attracts me more than if it were missing.

So maybe it shouldn't surprise that this shot ended up being one of my favorite from the day and the one I chose to use in this Project 52 post, even amongst the captures of City Hall and the Chinatown gate that I also liked (down below after a jump rather than creating a separate post).

(Jump!)

Maybe "street photography" is the closest approximation to what I'm aiming to do? I'm not much for straight up portraiture (save for Sharon); sports photography is still a dream, over-specific and non-applicable to what I've been doing due to a scarcity of opportunity of late; but I'm not particularly interested in the practice of getting in people's personal space to take their picture (that I best understand to be essential to street photography), either. It's still unclear to me. Perusing my Flickr Photostream yields a mix of shots with and without any people in it. I think some directed (or pre-planned and specifially-intentioned) shoots are in order for this year. I would like to clarify between what I like, what I do, and mine the heck out of the intersection of those two sets to yield good fruit.

For Sharon's first free weekend in a while, we grabbed a Zipcar and drove down to Philadelphia to get out of Dodge for a bit and see some family. It's a pleasant enough drive from one city to another; we went from the parking garage in New York to Grandmom's house outside Philly in just about two hours.

After a leisurely lunch with aunt, uncle, Sabrina, and Gmom, we drove into town and wandered around City Hall, Chinatown, and the carnival for the senses that is Philadelphia's terrific Reading (pronounced "Redding") Terminal Market.

Two shots of City Hall: