StreetSoul

Author: StreetSoul

  • Five Minutes

    Five Minutes

    There is too much empty space on the left.

    At least, that is the first thing you could say about this photograph.

    The man is pushed well over to the right, almost trapped between the edge of the frame and the dark vertical line behind him. The wall takes up far more room than seems reasonable. A cleaner composition would probably crop some of it away.

    I tried that.

    It became tidier. And worse.

    That empty wall is doing more than I first thought. It slows the photograph down. The man seems heavier because of it. More fixed in place. There is the cigarette, the glass, the bent leg, the hand hanging down. Nothing dramatic. Just five minutes, perhaps. Maybe less.

    The RAW file was much flatter. The whites were getting away from me, especially the shirt and the wall. His face and arms did not separate enough from the rest of the scene. Everything was there, but it was all speaking at roughly the same volume.

    So the edit was mostly about deciding what should stay quiet.

    I pulled the highlights back, gave the skin and clothes more weight, deepened the darker parts and left the wall alone. I did not want detail everywhere. I did not want to “fix” the empty space either.

    Most importantly, I kept the awkward composition.

    The final frame is darker, rougher and less polite than the RAW. Good. The photograph needed that.

    The space on the left still looks excessive.

    It should.

  • Before Everything Is Done

    How do you make time for self-care?

    View all responses

    I’m not very good at making time for myself.

    I’ll go out once I’ve answered this. Once I’ve finished that. There’s always one more small thing, and I keep believing it will only take five minutes. Then I look at the time.

    So, usually, making time for myself means closing the computer with something still pending. I find that surprisingly difficult. I can spend far too long deciding whether I can spare half an hour. Long enough that I could have gone out and come back.

    Taking the camera helps. It gives me a reason to leave, although I’m slightly annoyed that I seem to need one. Nobody expects you to justify going out for bread. Going out to look at things feels harder to explain. Mostly to myself, I should say. Nobody is actually standing at the door demanding an itinerary.

    Once I’m outside, I start noticing things. Someone lingering in a doorway, a reflection, two people apparently having very different afternoons. Most of it never becomes a photograph. I’m too slow, or the background is a mess, or it turns out there wasn’t much there in the first place. I still like looking.

    It doesn’t work every time. Sometimes I’m three streets away and still having the same tedious argument in my head. But then something catches my attention and, for a bit, I lose my place in it. That’s a relief.

    The awkward part is what I do afterwards. I want to see the photographs. Fair enough. Then I want to edit one, find a title, decide where it belongs, put it on the website, prepare the posts. Suddenly there’s a list again. I’ve managed to give a walk an administration department.

    I enjoy that work too, which complicates things. I don’t always notice when I’ve stopped enjoying it and started trying to get through it.

    I’m trying to get better at leaving a photograph unedited for a while. Letting a message wait. Taking whatever time is available without first clearing enough space for some ideal, uninterrupted afternoon. Twenty minutes will do. On some days I remember this early enough to use them.

    And I’d like to come home without immediately checking whether I got anything worth keeping. I’m less good at that. The camera is right there.

    For now, I’m still beside a wall, waiting for someone to walk into the light. Someone does, and I’m too slow. I mutter something and stay a little longer.

    Mixed Reviews — Small Dramas
    Leica M10 Monochrom · Elmarit-M 28mm f/2.8 ASPH.

  • The weight of empty space

    The weight of empty space

    I know. There’s a lot of wall.

    If your first thought was that I should crop some of it away, I can see why. The man is over on the right, almost everything seems to happen around him, and the left side looks rather underemployed. But every time I look at this photograph, I want to keep that space.

    He’s lighting a cigarette. His head drops towards his hands, his arms close around the gesture, and for a moment there’s this little knot of concentration. That’s where I look first. He doesn’t need to be in the middle to hold my attention. The face and hands are already doing quite enough.

    A man sitting at a table, holding his hands close to his face, appears contemplative. Next to him is a bottle of Mahou beer on the table and a smartphone. The scene is in black and white.

    The thirds grid helps, up to a point. The man sits around the right vertical; the bottle and ashtray are closer to the left one. Nothing lines up with mathematical precision. Fine by me. I use the grid to see the distribution more clearly, and I get suspicious when it starts being offered as proof that a photograph works. Plenty of dull photographs obey the rules impeccably.

    What matters more here, I think, is the triangle. One corner is down by the ashtray and bottle, another is up at the mask, and the third is towards the lower right, at the outer limit of the man’s body. It’s a broad shape that gathers much of the action into one area. The diagonal from the ashtray to the mask runs through the man’s head; the base returns across the lower part of the scene. His face sits within that arrangement. It isn’t one of the three corners.

    The bottle does a fair bit of work, too. It’s dark, quite solid, easy to pick out against the wall. With the ashtray, it gives my eye somewhere to go on the left before returning to the hands. Take those objects away and the balance would be much harder to hold. A small thing can carry a surprising amount of weight in a photograph.

    And then there’s the wall. Still there, taking up all that room.

    For me, that emptiness gives him a certain solitude. There’s space beside him that nobody fills, while he’s absorbed in this very small task. I’m talking about how the picture feels. I have no idea whether he felt lonely. He may have been perfectly happy and mildly annoyed with his lighter. Photographers are very good at finding existential crises in people who just want a smoke.

    A closer crop would give us more of the man and less of that odd distance around him. It might make a stronger immediate impression. I’d miss the slower part: looking at him, wandering across the table, feeling how much room is left over.

    The mask complicates things nicely. I notice his mouth almost hidden by his hands, then that other mouth wide open above him. It’s a ridiculous little pairing. He’s busy with his cigarette; the figure behind him seems to be taking the whole business very badly.

  • Five Apps That Earn Their Place

    Five Apps That Earn Their Place

    My phone is full of apps I apparently needed urgently and have not opened since 2023. These five are different.

    Lichess is where I play chess, usually with the confidence of a grandmaster and the decision-making of a distracted pigeon. It keeps my brain awake and my ego under control.

    Bicipalma gets me around Palma. It turns the city into a map of possible routes, provided there is a bicycle available and somewhere to leave it. Urban mobility still enjoys a little suspense.

    Scanner Pro is less glamorous but indispensable. Documents, receipts, notes, strange bits of paper I might need one day—it quietly converts physical disorder into neatly organised digital disorder.

    Leica connects my camera to my phone. I use it to transfer photographs, check them away from the camera and sometimes confirm that, yes, the focus really is where I feared it was.

    Then there is Argentum Camera. A black-and-white camera app with none of the usual circus. It is simple, restrained and surprisingly close to the way I already see the street: light, shadow, gesture and very little patience for colour.

    Five apps for playing, moving, organising and making photographs. None of them promises to transform my life. That may be the main reason I keep using them.

  • Already in Motion

    Already in Motion

    The best thing I’ve ever found randomly on the street wasn’t money or some forgotten treasure. It was a story that had already begun without me.

    A boy tore across the square, toy gun in hand, somewhere between a chase and an escape. I had no idea who the enemy was, or what rule I had just broken by walking into the scene. For a fraction of a second, he looked at me. Click.

    The street rarely explains itself. Thankfully. If it did, half of photography would be paperwork.

  • Staying

    Staying

    The kindest thing anyone ever did for me was stay.

    It sounds almost too small when I write it like that.

    There was nothing to solve. Or maybe there was, but certainly not that day. I don’t remember any important words. I’m not even sure there were many words.

    I remember the presence.

    Someone sitting there without trying to drag me somewhere better.

    People are uncomfortable with that. I am too. When someone is having a bad time, we start looking for things to say. Something useful, something hopeful. We want the machinery running again.

    Sometimes it doesn’t run.

    So we sit there.

    That was what this person did.

    No pressure to explain myself. No need to make the situation less awkward. I didn’t have to pretend I was doing better than I was.

    And they didn’t leave.

    Maybe that’s why it has stayed with me more than other acts of kindness. Gifts disappear. Most advice gets forgotten. Even very sincere words can become strangely vague after a few years.

    But I remember somebody being there when there really wasn’t much to be there for.

    Nothing dramatic happened.

    They stayed for a while.

    I needed that more than I knew.

  • The Obvious Answer

    The Obvious Answer

    I’d be a street photographer. Yes, predictable: a photographer choosing photography. What a plot twist.

    I’d go out without a clear route and probably spend far too long beside some ugly wall because something there felt almost right. Most days I’d come home with very little. One decent photograph, perhaps. Sometimes none.

    I like that kind of work. The walking, the looking, getting it wrong and going out again. A camera makes me notice the odd little scenes people create without realising it. Without one, I’d probably hurry past.

    If the salary were the same, that’s what I’d do. Sore feet included.

  • Three Times the Same Stranger

    Three Times the Same Stranger

    The weirdest coincidence I’ve ever experienced didn’t happen to me. It happened inside one of my photographs.

    At a fairground, I raised the camera because of an embrace, an exposed arm and a small cactus tattooed above the word Strong. That was enough.

    Later, while editing, I noticed the rest: three female figures with dark hair and black tops, all facing away from me, arranged from largest to smallest. They looked like three versions of the same person, or one life moving backwards through the frame.

    I hadn’t planned any of it. For a fraction of a second, the street put everything in exactly the right place.

    The camera noticed the joke before I did. As usual.

  • When Tradition Meets the Street

    When Tradition Meets the Street

    One tradition I never really get tired of is Sant Joan in Ciutadella, Menorca.

    It is supposed to be about horses, riders, music and rituals that have been repeated for generations. And it is. But once you are actually there, squeezed into a street with far too many people, it becomes something else as well.

    There is noise everywhere. Horses suddenly rise above the crowd. Someone pushes past you. Someone else is trying not to spill a drink. People shout, wait, sweat, laugh, get tired. For a few seconds everything seems organised, and then it isn’t.

    That part interests me more than the ceremony itself.

    I have photographed Sant Joan several times, and I rarely find myself looking for the obvious picture. A horse against an old stone building can be beautiful, certainly. But I usually end up looking sideways. At the man pressed against a wall. A hand appearing between bodies. Someone watching instead of celebrating. A face that looks completely exhausted while everybody around it is having the time of their lives.

    Those little things are closer to the photography I normally make.

    In black and white, Sant Joan also changes. A lot of the colour and spectacle disappears. What remains is sweat, skin, stone, dust, light, horses and people trying to occupy the same small piece of street.

    And perhaps that is what I like about it.

    The ritual may be centuries old, but the people inside it are still just people. They get distracted. They get tired. They behave strangely. They ruin perfect compositions.

    Which, photographically, is usually when things start getting interesting.

    See more here.

  • The Day I Didn’t Know I’d Miss

    The Day I Didn’t Know I’d Miss

    Daily writing prompt
    If you could relive one day from your past, which day would it be and why?
    View all responses

    I don’t think I’d choose one of the obvious days. Not a wedding, not a trip, not some supposedly unforgettable moment. Those days already know they are important. Everyone behaves accordingly, which is probably part of the problem.

    I’d choose a completely ordinary day. I don’t even know which one. A day when I woke up, had breakfast, complained about something stupid, went somewhere familiar, talked to people I assumed would always be there. Nothing worth writing down. At the time, I probably wanted the day to hurry up.

    That’s the day I’d like back. Not to fix anything. I wouldn’t warn anyone or try to behave better. I’d probably still waste time, get irritated, miss things happening right in front of me. But I’d know. I’d know that all those boring little details were already disappearing, just very slowly.

    Maybe that’s enough. One ordinary day, exactly as it was. Even the stupid parts.