porto street shooting

Tuesday, January 20, 2015

Trivia (CXXIII) - The delayed introduction

i shoot strangers in the streets of porto, portugal

My name is Ricardo Porto and I shoot strangers in the streets of Porto, Portugal. I’ve been doing it for the last 4 and a quarter years, a hobby turned crusade. I always shoot alone and most of my pictures are posed portraits. I choose people that I find interesting and I ask them for a pic. They usually say yes.

I have one camera, one fixed lens, two batteries, one gray card and one lenspen and this is the only gear I use. No backpack, no photo bag, no tripod, no flash, no mega-zoom.

I usually walk the same city areas, mainly downtown, but as I like it to be kind of random, I never prepare my photowalk in advance.

I publish daily on my blog and all portraits are captioned with the place where they were taken and a brief description of what caught my attention.

Camera: I use a Panasonic GF2 Micro Four Thirds camera + 20 mm f 1.7 lens. It's a little bit old but I got attached to her and it's difficult to end the relationship, though i have secret thoughts about other cameras.

Settings: aperture priority, usually at f2.2-2.8 (depending of the number of subjects in the pic), custom WB (5350 k) and ISO 100.

Post: I use lightroom just to give a bit contrast (+10), clarity(+20), less highlights (-30), adjust WB if needed and resize (720 short edge).