About

Sierra Papa WTF?

Sierra Papa  (See-Air-Rah Pah-Pah) are the phonetic alphabet prowords for "SP".
So what?
"SP" is a common abbreviation for "Street Photography".
This blog is about (mainly) - you guessed it - Street Photography.
The really obvious question then is of course, "why call the damn thing sierra-papa.blogger.com?".
And the really obvious answer is "Because 'sp', 'street', 'streetphotography' and all the other more obvious variations were taken. Well duh!"

Any way since this is a blog about Street Photography, I must be Yet Another Street Photographer. YASP.
A really new one.
So don't expect too much - well don't expect anything. I am very much in my formative stages. I am an egg.

I started "shooting street" about Feb 2012. I'd had my first DSLR a D7000 for about 6 months and had just discovered that a certain style of shooting,  which I had loved for years, had a name and was accepted as a stand alone genre.
It was "Street Photography".

Since then I've also learnt that Street has moved on.
It's not all black and whites of people, "characters" as Bruce Gilden calls them, standing on city streets.
In fact it never was.

The widely acknowledged master one Henry Cartier-Bresson almost universally known by the intials HCB has been shooting street with the eye of an a painter since the 1930s.
His subjects were often people, but his compositions were geometry, light, balance, contrast.
Anyway although HCB had known that street was more than black and white characters since the '30s, I didn't.
I only discovered that mid  2012.
I also discovered that street has really evolved for some people. Street doesn't always even include a street.
The "new street" as I think of if is colourful (or black and white) and contains characters (or not). It's all about composition. And sometimes light. And often shadow.
Although lots of modern practitioners of street, haven't gotten past black and white "characters" standing on the street, modern street has gone way past that.
And here I am, about 18 months into my career as Yet Another Street Photographer.

This blog may track my path and progress, as well as occasionally pontificate and probably ejaculate, on the genre.
And probably other genres of photography, as well as photography generally.
And maybe even, gear.
You see Street is what I shoot most of, but I still love shooting other stuff. And I am a geek, so the gear gets to me too.

This blog will probably cover all of it.
But I anticipate the meat of it will be my foray into street.