A new direction. / December 1, 2022 by Dale Firth

For the past while now I have been pursuing a new direction with my photography. During the pandemic, working full time in the bicycle industry. We were overwhelmed with demand. There wasn’t enough hours in the day to get all the work done that was requested. I took some of my downtime and still did some street photography but it didn’t feel the same with so many people at home and not out and about. I needed something to distract me from the stress of work and the toll it was taking on me physically.

The UNSQUASHABLE Tour-Tec Pro shoe. Imaged used as part of the launch of the shoe.

Once the gyms opened so that you could go and do some workouts, I jumped back into playing racquetball. I hadn’t done this since I was a kid. I bought some gear and took the plunge. I noticed almost immediately how much fitness I had lost. The ability to move quickly, the strength I once had. The damage that stress had on my body was very noticeable. I was determined to get it back though. I spent an hour here and an hour there and eventually I was able to work out on the court for the whole 45 minutes without a break. Much better than barely lasting 10 minutes in the beginning. The fitness was returning.

Video of the UNSQUASHABLE Tour-Tec Pro shoe. Red colour way for Canada.

There was also something else that returned. The desire to create images again. Instead of wanting to just do street photography or landscapes I wanted to capture what it felt like to get on the court and push myself back into fitness. I started shooting the things that I saw and felt were interesting. In this time I also tried squash and tennis. Both which I had some success with and they also helped develop my fitness and some other benefits which I will cover later.

Image of yours truly. Used by UNSQUASHABLE on a post about dedication and how success is earned.

The change that all this working out and capturing the process made was, digital content. Now, I had created for social media before, doing my own channels and some for work (actually quite a bit for work). Now I was getting the attention of a few brands. What I found interesting, is that they were interested in the way that I shot. The black and white images and videos that I was putting on my new racquet sport related channels were attracting attention. I had an interest in these brands and that’s why I was using their products.

I did some research and found that what I was unintentionally doing is called UGC, user generated content. This has led to a few deals and most importantly has created relationships in a new industry where I feel value. The benefit of fitness from playing these sports and the connection I have through creating this content that I would make regardless of the connection has led to a new direction in the creator space. Developing this content while utilizing my past experience in photography, all to develop my unique style of content and the interest it generates, not only removes the stress I felt when I started but has also increased my creative desire and help lead the charge in making positive change in my life.

More of the UNSQUASHABLE Tour-Tec Pro shoe. Used by Opticsports Canada. Distributor for UNSQUASHABLE in Canada.

First shoot of the year. / January 17, 2022 by Dale Firth

Being a street photographer usually means that you are outside when you are shooting. Living in Canada, also means that during the winter you get really cold. I don’t really like winter, especially when my fingers or toes get cold. Maybe that’s me just getting older but I do prefer when it is warm outside. In Calgary we get the benefit of a weather pattern called chinooks. After some weeks of below seasonable temperatures we had a week of above zero degree weather. Today the temperature got to +10 Celsius. Tomorrow it will be -14 Celsius.

Being able to take this time to go out and shoot makes a big difference in my world. I don’t always get to go out as much as I want and during the winter month’s that gets compounded with the weather. I like the low light that we get during the winter month’s here but it doesn’t last long during the day. getting out to take advantage of the scene’s that it will create.

While I have only been doing street photography for 3 and a half years, It’s good to know that I can go out and find inspiration to keep capturing images. This time of year I see many photographers posting about burn out and how they are going to change the way that they are going to do things going forward. going out and shooting street feels right, I feel like I belong out there capturing images. Sometimes it a great scene, sometimes it’s a funny story in my head.

The one thing that I am going to change going forward is putting more effort into creating some printed products. I am not going to stop shooting or change how or what I shoot. I want to increase the amount f places that I can go to capture some street images. The first shoot of the year injects some good energy into the projects and ideas that come up for the upcoming year.

I hope that you have been enjoying the work that I have been doing and how I see street photography. Keep coming back to see more images and read about shooting street. If you haven’t already check out the Instagram page as I have been posting there daily for over 3 years.

Well dressed and happy to see my camera.

What inspires you to create? / November 8, 2021 by Dale Firth

Something inside you desires to get out. It can be a story or an image or an idea. many people have these things inside them but for many people, nothing more ever comes of it. For some though, creating something is necessary for daily life.

What is the thing that sparks the beginning of creating something, What is the inspiration? Do you see the completed image in your head and then you set out to make it? is it just the beginning of an idea and the experimenting with that idea results in creating something? Or is it just the process and the routine of practice that produces your work?

For myself, there is a mixture of things as I change as a photographer. A glimpse of a finished image or the change in approach or new technique that makes me want to see in a different way. I never intend to visualize an image to completion in my head. I want to be able to enjoy the surprise at the time of editing when I get a satisfactory result. I spend time thinking through the process of what I need to do to get something that would look like what I have envisioned.

Being open to any of the inspiration that may come along is something that should be practiced. You never know what will fill you with inspiration to do something. It could be a combination of colours or a texture that you see. Today I spent some time working on a new to me technique of Intentional Camera Movement. The idea is to create an image that is a surrealistic representation of the scene before you. When thinking through the process of how to make these images I found myself interested in contrast of details and strong colour representation instead of the standard capture of the scene. There is a certain reduction of the scene to those simple elements yet you still know what you are looking at. With the reduction of details there is still a lot to look at.

While this is the first attempts at this style of image, I have found some information from the experiment that will help the success of more images in the future. In this case a certain amount of success will serve as Inspiration in the future to create more work. Inspiration based on this experience, seems fluid and ever changing. All you need is to be open to it. Now go out and create!

Sometimes it's just fun. / October 14, 2021 by Dale Firth

Sometimes when you go out to take pictures, you just want to have fun and push the shutter button.

I have written previously about all the decision making that you have to do as a photographer. You spend a lot of time thinking and calculating. For some you just want to get back to basics and just have fun. In a world where we prize effort and production over balance and downtime, it’s important that we take a break from pursuing improvement and skill building and remember why we started to do something in the first place.

For creators, no matter the discipline it’s important that we take the time to play. Taking time to have fun and do something that might not be commercially viable but makes us happy and recharges our creativity. There shouldn’t be any special processes or steps you should have to take. The nature of playtime, is that there shouldn’t be any rules. Just go and have fun. forget all the things you think that you have to do and just go.

This could be hanging on your office wall.

Recently I took some time before work to do just that. I went out with the idea that if I didn’t get a single image it didn’t matter. I didn’t worry about what time of day it was, what kind of light there might be or where the best locations would be. I just went out and pointed my camera at things and pushed the shutter button. There were even images that I captured using my phone and even that was fun.

Doing this helps avoid the feelings of fatigue or burnout with your craft as it shows you that you still enjoy your craft and that your interest level is still high. When you do have to ‘work’, it doesn’t feel like work and you continue to enjoy what you do. Sometimes you do something during your playtime that will give you a solution for a project that may have been causing you stress. Even though you set out to just have fun and not actively work on improvement, that’s what ends up happening anyway.

Light through really clear water. Shot and edited on iPhone.

Always make time for fun, you may end up with some really surprising results.

What does Photography mean to you? / August 23, 2021 by Dale Firth

Out of curiosity, I often wonder what Photography means to people that view it. Do they enjoy it in a similar manner that I do? How differently do they see the image? Do they enjoy the perspective that I shot it from or the interpretation of the scene that I chose? Let me know in the comments what you enjoy about the images.

Empty industrial building. Shot on Canon 5DMKII. 13yr old camera.

Many of my previous posts have talked about the reason that I shoot or a piece of gear that I use. Often I justify a position that I take on an idea of why these things are important to me. Photographers often struggle with the current situation or outlook on image making, whether that is about new equipment or trends in the industry. This is understandable as growth of any type of artist changes your perspective on how you see your practice and the things around you.

Another empty industrial building. Canon 5DMKII

Recently I took a step back from the constant pursuit of increasing image quality from the use of new equipment. Every camera company always touts the latest equipment is what you need to get the quality of file you want when capturing an image. While I was ready to invest in some new equipment, it was never in stock and was months away from being available. I felt betrayed a little by an industry I was trying to support that just couldn’t deliver the tools that I felt I needed to make the images I wanted to make.

Friendly bunny visiting while shooting in the industrial area. Canon EF28mm f1.8 handling the portrait here. Cheap discontinued lens for the win!

I definitely got suckered into the industry hype around new mirrorless cameras and equipment. I realized this when looking at some medium format images posted on Reddit. The portrait images in question had this amazing 3 dimensional look that medium format film photography is known for. All of this equipment was 30 years old or more and all shot on film. I was immediately thinking of my mirrorless camera and how different it was from these older film cameras and at the same time realizing why the images I was creating with it are different than what I was looking at on Reddit.

Train track marker. Canon 1DMKIIN with 85mm f1.8. 17yr old camera.

I don’t always have the time to shoot film even if I was using some of those older cameras, I did have another option. My older DSLR and the fast prime lenses that I have for them. While they go against what most of the industry is adopting as new and good, this older bit of equipment is exactly what I needed for what I wanted to create. This also lead me closer to the answer of what photography means to me.

Wild flowers and the abandoned door. 5DMKII 28mm @ f1.8

Photography, for me most of the time, is the tool that I use to bring forward the image that I see in my head when I look at a scene. Its the way an old building looks, or how I interpret a sign on a door or the beauty of an old chair that nobody sits on anymore. It can also be the experience in a moment or how a relatively mundane thing can look interesting. By being a photographer I have developed the creative muscle that sees things this way and technical part of photography allows me to share that with people. Unlike a painter, everything in my image is already there, the skill is bringing it out until it is visible to anyone that looks at it. I could use composite techniques to change the image to be more fantastical but the practice of working around this limitation is something that I enjoy and makes me happier when things work out the way I want. to me it’s the same as the landscape photographer that travels to the far off land where everything looks magical at a few times a day and they are the only ones to see it. I like doing the same with places that see thousands of people everyday and maybe I get to show them this place in a whole different way.

The broken down break room. Chair outside an industrial building. 28mm @ f1.8

What a Photographer does. / August 18, 2021 by Dale Firth

There are dozens of decisions to make every second. Seems kind of masochistic at times.

The beginning of a photographic path / June 16, 2021 by Dale Firth

“Over a year ago on June 15th I purchased a used camera and began a new path in photography. This was the day that I started trying street photography”. I started writing this post 2 years ago. I have now just passed my 3 year anniversary of shooting street photography. What I wrote still rings true today. The following is the original post with a few edits to keep it up to date.

I was scared to shoot on the street, Like really scared. I was worried about people getting upset that I was making an image or even worse, that I could not find a scene and make a decent image. Mostly afraid that there would be conflict that I was taking a photograph. Armed with my newfound Fuji Xpro-1, I found that it was the perfect piece of equipment for this style of shooting. Understated and unassuming, helped with people not really paying attention to me. It was super quiet and people never really hear the shutter. With the viewfinder off to the side and being a right eye shooter, it’s hard for people to know where you are really looking. Nobody actually cared what I was doing. Just another tourist with a camera.

What I found was, I saw many scenes when I was wandering. After the first hour I realized there that I was enjoying it much more than I initially thought I would. Remembering back to all those street images that I saw in photography books and how much I liked them and the fear associated with what I thought the experience was really like. I was wrong. I get caught up in the moment searching for an image, deciphering the scene and capturing how I see it.

When I decided to try shooting street I was just filling in some photographic experience that I was missing. It was something that I thought most good photographers had to go through. I like shooting portraits but don’t have an abundance of models. When I look at images from shooters like Fan Ho or Saul Leiter I was always brought in by the scene or the lighting in the images. I felt that there was more to the image than the obvious subject matter. I wanted to be able to create images that were like these. I didn’t have the same cities that some of the famous shooters but I had a city anyways. Could I make similar images with what I had? I thought I could. After my first few outings I was completely hooked.

Over a year later (three years later), I am still shooting street. I have based vacations off having some time to shoot in a new city. Like all photography, my style and ability keeps evolving. Seven thousand images later, I now choose to be more street shooter than anything else. I can see how some of these photographers chose to shoot what they shot. What I initially understood from the images that I saw was, that they were elevating a snap shot by separating a subject from everything else that was going on around them. There is so much more to a street photograph. The scene, interpretation, someone interacting with the scene and a little luck to catch a moment.

I go through the scenes that I have witnessed and try to create ideas and concepts that I want to capture. Like the shot that flows of the long exposure of the crosswalk. It shows the movement that a photograph doesn’t always capture. Mixing things I learned from long exposure landscape photography and applying it to a street scene. I can now start developing images based on what I see inside my head and taking control of the final outcome. I think there will be more in the future and once we can travel again, visiting new places to apply my style of photography too.

Is there a reason for Street Photography? / May 10, 2021 by Dale Firth

It has been a while since I have posted anything. Actually, I planned on writing this post January of 2020. I procrastinated in writing it for a while. Something I am very Pro at. Then I got busy at work, then the pandemic started and I got very busy and very tired. I work in the bicycle industry and when we got locked down, all the shops went crazy with business. It also changed the scene downtown where I normally go to photograph.

Once you could go back outside, many of the offices were either closed or people were working from home. Streets were empty. It looked like the weekend downtown every day. It was hard to go and photograph when your routine could not happen the same way. Initially it was hard to go out as it was much more difficult to get the images you were used to getting. It also didn’t feel like you were getting the same type of images. I heard similar things from people that have much larger cities to photograph in. Some people felt like it wasn’t worth going out and some changed how they worked and what they captured.

I thought that things would return to normal quickly and this was just temporary. That was not the case. Things got quiet, then there were protests, even up here in Canada. People eventually returned to some form of habit but it wasn’t the same. I wondered if there was really a point to going out and photographing the street. What I found was things that were altered because of the lack of people. Scenes that changed. Bridges that were turned into bike paths as they closed the street to car traffic, places you could normally be and images that you wouldn’t be able to capture without the closure. The light was still there so you can still capture the scene.

While street photography for most is how people interact with a scene, the street photography of this time is the scene with very few people to interact with it. This is recording what this time is really like. Something that there might be of interest in the future. It may not be of importance now but it may be in the future. This I think is the reason for street photography. It is to show how society was at any given point in time. As the photographer we decide what we show or omit. How we perceive the scene and what we want to say. You have to take advantage of the moment. Maybe you can stand in the middle of the street a little longer or shoot with a different lens.

Empty downtown parking lot on a weekday.

I think that the reason for street photography is still important. It might be different now, but still important. Maybe people just like the pretty images on your Instagram account or they live vicariously through the images you make. Keep creating work, even if it’s not the same.