These days close to Christmas, our town usually has a "small recovery" and can give some impression of that "normality lost over the years"... Perhaps this happens due the return of some people to visit their relatives or perhaps it has to do with these dates themselves and the local tradition of celebrating them... But be that as it may, there is a slight increase in street movement.

These are pictures which I could call "raw and real street". These images have a very basic editing, as I wanted to capture the vision of the streets of Montalbán in order to preserve it and share it here with you.

All these photos were taken on the morning of the 23rd of December (yesterday for the purposes of this post)... It was one of those mornings of warm air during which the fog remains a bit high and turns the sky into a sort of "white reflector" which provides an even illumination and eliminates the shadows in a charming way for my desire to do this kind of street photography work.

This time I used my old 100mm fixed macro lens. This is an ideal lens to keep me "far enough away from the scene" and to "compress" elements in the photographic plane thus generating more drama (yes, I love "drama")... Also this lens is very bright and that allows me to handle very comfortably when exposing.

This type of photography allows us to see how deeply the severe economic crisis has affected the appearance of the town's streets... The façades with the paint falling off, screams on the walls, water leaks on the roads... Yes, the general appearance is quite neglected and the neglect by the inhabitants and the local authorities is noticeable. I don't think this is because they want the situation to be like this. It has to do with the lack of financial resources and the deep and entrenched corruption at all levels of government. However, despite all this, people are still here "trying to have a good time"... But it is certainly not easy for everyone here.

Taking street photos is, let's say "my main addiction"... So that's what I did early yesterday and also today morning. Surely tomorrow morning, while almost everyone is hungover or sleeping, I'll be out on the streets again taking pictures or maybe (as I do occasionally) I'll take advantage of the Christmas morning solitude to escape to the country roads... We'll see what happens, but I'm pretty sure I'll be out taking photos as I do every day.

ADDITIONAL TECHNICAL NOTE: Photographs captured with my Nikon D7000 DSLR camera in RAW format, then processed in Adobe Camera RAW for adjustments regarding light, sharpening, contrast and depth... The pictures are then exported to JPG format on which minor modifications such as straightening and adding watermarks were carried out using PhotoScape 3.6.3.