Avoid the frog perspective! They said. Make sure you focus your camera right! They said.
Photography is as much about breaking rules as about following them.
I never followed any professional education. I never really cared about the workings of a camera. I had a small one, a point and shoot, and an exhibition within a year of shooting with that 4 MegaPixel camera. Then I had a DSLR, a Nikon D80 which was huge and I loved it but I also had neck pains and then I started to resent having to wear it all day - plus the backpack with an extra lens and tripod.
So I switched to mirrorless. No neck pain = having the camera with me way more often, I figured.
So I took it with me. To the market, to the streets. It was the perfect camera for street photograph. REALY street photography not the sneaky coward stuff done from a huge distance, but up close - people tend to notice you less with an inconspicuous looking camera.
With my DSLR people walked around me if I was pointing the camera up. Great for architectural photography, bad for street photography.
So I shot more. And different stuff too. As I didn't do much street photography before for reasons mentioned above, I now started to suddenly enjoy it.
Big camera or small: making a self-portrait on the street in a mirror is still embarrassing though. So I tend to make them inside my house, or inside the bathroom of a café, or very very sneaky when no-one is around.
And YES, I have sharp version of this photograph, but I love the out-of-focus one better.
I guess I don't really like following rules.
My Inner Maier is an ode to Vivian Maier, a great female street photographer from an era that didn't have women doing photography much. No-one knew she even was a photographer, as she worked as a nanny and hid her secret passion from everyone. She never saw her own work as all her film rolls were undeveloped until someone discovered it after her death. She made a lot of self portraits in mirrors and windows, as well as street photography on par with the big names of her time like Henri Cartier-Bresson.
My Inner Maier series
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