Europe Trip 2023: Brugge (Part 1)
As with any journey to Europe from California, the trip started with an eleven hour flight. I touched down at Paris’ Charles de Gaulle Airport at 10:45am local time, only to find that the car rental agency wouldn’t have a vehicle ready for at least an hour, despite being reserved in advance. After a long wait, and the subsequent three hour drive, I was finally in Brugge.
I am a firm believer in trying to adjust my sleep schedule as quickly as possible when arriving in another time zone. In my opinion the best way to do that is to avoid napping or sleeping until at least the early evening, so in order to stay awake I hit the streets to get some food and then explore and walk around the city. I was barely able to stay conscious, despite being upright and moving. I figured that if I was able to keep my mind more active and focused, it would be easier to keep moving. What better way is there to focus the mind than to do some street photography!
I do want to make clear early on in these posts that street photography is far from my specialty! Normally I focus on controlled lighting in the studio, but the beauty of letting go and allowing compositions to come naturally as in street photography and landscapes is inspiring to me. As such I have been trying to experiment more with these forms of photography.
As it was getting later in the day the sun began to paint long stripes of light across the streets. As I meandered through parks and residential streets the buildings and greenery blocked the sun, revealing chiaroscuro of dappled and in some cases sharp highlights. Many of the compositions I stumbled across were on the busier side, but when edited as a black and white image the contrast in light created fascinating subjects.
It can be easy to fall into a habit of making every image black and white when editing street photos. It often creates a clear separation of subject and setting when photographing more complex scenes. In other cases color may be necessary to highlight the story within the image. Take for example the arched doorways I found in this brick wall. The wooden door stripped bare of multicolored layers of paint by the elements loses some intrigue when shown without color. The reds and greens portray the potential depth of history behind this portal. While black and white images often serve to elevate the contrast in an image it can also take away from a photograph’s potential by leaving context behind.
As my eyelids grew heavier and the sun fell lower the golden tones of early evening began to appear. In some cases the subject was obvious, such as the driver of a well-loved scooter, but in other cases my attention was caught by the play of light across cobblestone streets. Not every image needs a specific subject, sometimes the setting becomes the subject when conditions align.
Unfortunately most of the images during this walk weren’t up to my standards and didn’t earn as much as a preliminary edit in Capture One. In my opinion good street photos and those of cityscapes require either an exceptional subject or inspired composition. In this case the streets were fairly empty of subjects, and my ability to spot or create interesting frames was severely impacted by my tiredness. Eventually I gave up on trying to find images for the day, but my curiosity was certainly piqued by the potential images the next day might bring.
