Backyard Construction – Austin, Texas

You don’t have to go to exotic locales or to gritty, urban downtowns to do street photography. I snapped this in my backyard the other day.

I’m photographing my backyard project. Most are boring shots — the same angles to show the changes from week to week. But on that day, I had fun shooting the construction workers in action.

Back 13 years ago, I made the switch to digital to document the construction of my current house. I figured that if I shot about 1,300 photos with my modest 2.1 megapixel Canon S300, I would break even relative to the development cost of film. Over a decade later, with well over 200,000 shots (not with the same camera), I would have never guessed that I would be so enamored with photography.

This is my favorite photograph from my house construction back in 2002. I guess I shot “street photography” before I knew what is was. Back then, I took images more by luck than with pre-planning. I’m a bit better at pre-visualizing images now — or at least I hope so.