My first ever street photography, in Palermo

Upon seeing these shots of a fish market by Hive account@azwar.ipank, I was reminded of the first time I ever travelled with a real camera. It was in 2016, and I was on a company retreat on Sicily, near Palermo. In fact, strictly measured, this was the moment I became A Photographer, instead of a tourist taking pictures. I borrowed the kit, and for a long time was not even able to remember what it was, but today, for this post, I found the remaining original files and peeked into the EXIF data, and can now report that I shot all of these on Fujufilm X-Pro2 with a XF10-20mm F4 lens.

Palermo is simply a dream for street photography. The rawness and immediacy of life is bursting out all around. At the time I only had some vague ideas about what I was looking for, or how to use the camera, but it was immense fun to be looking at the world through the "photographer's eye". I now see people walking around with cameras, scanning their environs looking for The Shot, and think back fondly to the transformation that I went through when I started shooting.

This photo shoot is also a notable case of failure in my skills at digital archiving. In looking through the shots, it became clear to me that a few of my favorites are missing in their original form, and the only copies that I'm able to locate are in the archive bundle that I downloaded from Facebook just prior to permanently deleting my account there. Here are the poor victims that will never be experienced fully again.

It looks like I had just discoverd the Saturation slider for the first time 🤣

Finally, here are a few shots of myself that were taken by a colleage of mine on that trip. Like the camera, I was borrowing the daughter at the time :D