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I love photographing people. I love documenting society and human nature. Street photography is a gentle art, observational, without the hard edges of journalistic photography. It's quite free form — like literary fiction as opposed to the prescriptive forms of genre fiction. I don't think I could be a portraitist, or fashion photographer, or war photographer. (War photographer. Ya. This is my excuse, the art form.)

I didn't always photograph folk. It wasn't until 2009 that I stumbled on some good instruction in street photography. This was at a small photography school in Vancouver called Focal Point. I didn't get the full Focal Point experience. It offered full programs and had a funky reputation, but I only took a few street oriented courses. (Focal Point closed in 2012 after 39 years of operation.)

These courses were just what I needed to move my photography forward, away from the more static 'urban landscape' photography (buildings, blossoms and bottle caps) that I had been practicing. Gaining the confidence to photograph street scenes let me apply my compositional skills to a vastly more interesting subject within the urban landscape: the dynamic world of people doing their people things in the ways we do them today.

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