Angelina Hue

Less than a week ago, I was enjoying the glorious sunshine, fresh seafood and impressive landscape in the north of Spain. I’ve since settled back into ‘regular life’ in Brussels, which includes cleaning house, doing laundry and catching up on work. I still need to organise my digital photo files of this summer holiday though.

I think I will sort these out much sooner than usual as most of my photos were taken with my iPhone and I had processed the preferred shots (using VSCO Cam) during the trip.

I also brought along my ‘new’ rangefinder, a secondhand Canonet QL17 GIII that I bought on eBay and was using for the first time. Happy to say that the camera worked well and the three rolls of pictures turned out fine.

My trusty Fuji X100 had to sit out of this Iberian holiday as I didn’t want to juggle three cameras while climbing mountains and steep city sidewalks. But here’s a shot of the X100 alongside the Canonet – they are almost similar in size with the latter being slighter larger (and also significantly heavier).

Anyway, as I was browsing through the iPhone photos and scanned negatives of the photos taken with the Canonet, I noticed that there were few people present in my pictures. AB features most prominently amongst them – especially when we were hiking in the Picos de Europa and I was usually trailing behind him, carefully navigating between the cow dung and rocks 😉

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In a previous post, I pondered the question of where does one draw the line between voyeurism and art when photographing through the windows of someone’s home.

This time round, the main reason why there are not many people in my photos is because I generally don’t dare to photograph strangers. In this instance, I was a visitor passing through their city while they were minding their own business and going about their daily lives.

Where does one draw the line to avoid invading another person’s privacy?

What a dilemma this poses as what I’m most interested in photographing is ordinary life, la vie quotidienne. I like having an element of human presence in some of these pictures – it could be the person itself, a body part, a shadow, or even an object that implies that someone was there.

The following selection of photos were taking during this recent trip. As you will see, most of the people in them are unidentifiable. I hope that I’ve captured the beauty of each of these ordinary moments.

Lisbon // Canonet QL17, Kodak Portra 400

Setúbal // Canonet QL17, Kodak Portra 400

Porto // Canonet QL17, Kodak Portra 400

A Coruña // Canonet QL 17, Fuji Superia 200

Asturias // iPhone + VSCO Cam