Taking nature pictures the “street” way

This has been taken from a post I wrote several years ago.

Yesterday I went out shooting with my Nikon F3 loaded a roll of Fomapan 200 pushed to 400 and went into a place called Hvězda (Star if translated). It is a relatively large forest with a villa at the center surrounded by a wall in Prague.

Originally I was planning to go somewhere random and take street photos, but then I saw one of the many entrances to the forest I went in. I had an idea that I could take photos of people that walk there because it is a relatively popular place, but I rarely met anyone so I decided I had to change my approach because I really wanted to come back with some film I could develop later and I felt that if I didn’t take any pictures than it would be pointless to have gone out in the first place.

I tried to take pictures of the scenery first, but I am not really into landscapes and there wasn’t much free space without taking into account that I didn’t have a tripod. So I took something like 2 or 3 pictures and then came up with a better idea.

I imagined the paths like empty streets that I was going to take a picture of. I tried to tell a story with the pictures like I do with my streets I also tried to have a story to be told with each picture because that is like telling someone the conversation you had with that one person you took a picture of.

As I went on there were 4 or 5 interesting paths that I took a picture of one was steep full of rocks and objects in the way you had to get over like obstacles in life. The other was going from a thin one to a bigger path and then suddenly there was a tree in the middle stopping you from going on even though there was a path after that. And many other interesting ones.

Then I saw a building on the side of the road. No, it was more like a shack and it had circular windows in the position of eyes like it was a face. I tried to have it seem like it was looking around one of the trees. Then to have the trees open to the building etc. and I almost spent half an hour just taking pictures of it in different ways.

After that I started meeting more people and finally got to do what I wanted to do the whole time; take streets in a forest, you could call them forestees, 🙂

If you have a forest that is kept and has paths and small buildings in it you should try to go there and try to shoot pictures of it like a street photographer instead of a nature one. You will find out how interesting that can be and it will get your creative side working.