As I have worked to grow and stretch with my photography over the last few years, I discovered a genre of photography called street photography.  The idea is to document the people and activity on the street.  I haven’t studied much, but it seems that this photography comes out of cities…places where activity on the street is common, especially if you are paying attention.

This is a harder kind of photography for me, my natural inclination is to pay attention to nature and scenes rather than people and their activity.  It’s also about feeling intrusive, taking pictures of people instead of things.  I’ve read that many street photographers talk to their subjects and ask permission to take photos of them.  And this makes sense to me…but also takes away some of the candid nature of capturing the action in the moment.

So, I have been exploring this idea of street photography on my own terms, in my own place.  I started to capture interesting moments and interesting people on my beachwalks and hashtagging those photos with #beachpeople.  I love the variety of #beachpeople I come across.  They are interesting and diverse.  Some are obviously tourists visiting from other places–across the county and across the world.  And some are natives, the beach is their place.

As this week’s make cycle in the CLMOOC comes to an end, I’ve been considering what the idea of re-mediation means for me…and what my make might be.  And I started thinking about this collection of #beachpeople images.  I decided to I would take these still images and create a documentary-of-sorts.

That took some doing.  I considered using animoto and just tossing my photos in and letting animoto do the work.  But I felt constrained by the 30 second free movie and the lack of editorial control.  So I decided on iMovie–I’ve fiddled with it before (here and here)…but that also meant if I didn’t want to use the overly familiar iMovie music, I would have to figure out how to access open source music. I found this track called Folka Dot Tie by Mr Crispy–The Rat Room that created the sort of mood I was looking for and went to work.

As the mother of a filmmaker, I know what I want things to look like…but not necessarily how to do those things myself.  I did discover some options that I didn’t know about as I positioned the photos and got them to move.  And after spending hours getting to this point, I’m going to let this be good enough for now.  I hope this re-mediation captures the variety and character of this small subset of #beachpeople, documenting just a few of the many reasons I treasure my beachwalks…and enjoy viewing the world through my lens.

I’d love to know what you think when you take a peek at my #beachpeople