Knowing your purpose in street photography is one thing; packaging it and presenting it to the world is quite another. I guess I’ve known all along what my purpose has been in street photography and photography in general: turning people into art. It may sound generic. It may sound too vague. After all, isn’t that what portrait painters do? Or any number of other artists, for that matter?

I'm essentially a self-taught photographer who fell in love with street photography after living in India. I didn't know that street photography was a thing when I studied biomedical photography back in the film days, a career that never took off because of the sheer soul-killing aspect of it. At the time, I thought I could only make money as a photographer if I photographed models and fashion, subjects I had only a slight passion for and absolutely no background in. Such was my ignorance of photography. So when I'm asked these days which photographers I'm inspired by, I have no answer because I began shooting street photography without references. I was my only guide. Later, I studied photography more carefully and I can throw out names at you of photographers I like -- but none of them have informed my photography in the slightest. If I were to namedrop from the art world, there are only two that stood out for me in my early days: Egon Schiele and Marc Chagall. But this story is for another day.

Like each print in this collection, this was created using a camera technique called ICM, Intentional Camera Movement. Essentially, I use a slow shutter speed and shake the camera slightly to produce what will hopefully be something like an abstract impressionist image. When I'm lucky, I fall in love with the results, especially when dashes and lines look more painterly than something produced in the digital space. 85-90 % of the effects are created in-camera while the rest is creative changes to make the images resonate with me. I have a great printer who produces my limited editions, and I always love to visit him when it comes time to sign and ship a print to another part of the world.

Giving "Man" first billing is being gracious of me simply because if I'd provided full context, you'd easily notice that the machine part of the story is much larger than that of the human. The original image is of this gentleman sitting inside a large earth-mover at a construction site. As it is now, it looks to me as though he could be playing a video game. Even this could be an analogy for modern life.

Welcome to my series where I tell the story behind some of my fine art photography pieces. I hope to convey to photographers that street photography is a great source for creating art. If you’re like me and love the visual arts but lack any talent to paint or draw, photography has become my artistic surrogate that allows me to create whenever I desire. That’s because my companion passion is street photography and I’ve literally thousands of images to choose from to create fine art photography pieces, and with and with any luck, I’ll be producing works of art for years to come.

Welcome to my series where I tell the story behind some of my fine art photography pieces. I hope to convey to photographers that street photography is a great source for creating art. If you’re like me and love the visual arts but lack any talent to paint or draw, photography has become the artistic surrogate that allows me to create whenever I desire. That’s because my companion passion is street photography and I’ve literally thousands of images to choose from to create fine art photography pieces, and with and with any luck, I’ll be producing works of art for years to come.

For the first entry in my How I Turn My Street Photography Into Art, I’ll talk about the story behind “Emergence”.

Welcome to my series where I tell the story behind some of my fine art photography pieces. I hope to convey to photographers that street photography is a great source for creating art. If you’re like me and love the visual arts but lack any talent to paint or draw, photography has become my artistic surrogate that allows me to create whenever I desire. That’s because my companion passion is street photography and I’ve literally thousands of images to choose from to create fine art photography pieces, and with and with any luck, I’ll be producing works of art for years to come. For my first entry in my How I Turn My Street Photography Into Art, I’ll talk about the story behind “Girl Alone”.