Street Photography — “The Reader”

There I was, standing quietly in the shadow, my camera ready. Across the street, people moved like they always do — eyes fixed on glowing screens, thumbs scrolling endlessly from one three-second clip to the next. But then she appeared.

No phone. No earbuds. Just… a book.
That strange, clunky object made of paper, filled with words and stories — a relic from another time.

As she walked past an abandoned, graffiti-covered house, lost in her own world of ink and imagination, the scene unfolded like a paradox of past and present.
The forgotten building, the fading posters, the sharp sunlight cutting through the dust — and in the middle of it all, someone who remembered how to be still.

Shot with the Canon 5D Mark IV and the Sigma 100-400mm lens — proof that sometimes, the most remarkable street scenes are the quietest ones.

Photography, after all, is just another way of studying light and life.

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Street photography — Noordstraat, Tilburg

There’s something cinematic about the streets at night. The way neon cuts through darkness, shaping color where the sun has long faded. Around 20:00, under the soft hum of the “Sam Sam” sign, I noticed this quiet corner — a red brick façade, a shop window glowing like a memory, and a dark alley entrance beside it. Just then, a woman passed by, her stride catching the light for a fraction of a second. It felt like a frame from a detective film — a moment between mystery and calm.

Photographically, it was a challenge worth taking. Shot with the Canon 5D Mark IV and the Sigma 24–70mm Art, a lens known for its sharpness and contrast control. In near darkness, balancing ISO, shutter, and aperture becomes an act of intuition — reading the light as much as measuring it. And sometimes, timing rewards you with a story in motion.

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Sometimes the most interesting places are the ones most people pass by without noticing. This narrow alley in the center of Tilburg caught my attention during a small street photography adventure with a friend.

Normally, I work in color, but this time I decided to embrace black and white — something I rarely do. Without color, the eye is drawn to form, texture, and contrast. Every brick, every reflection of light becomes part of the composition.

Shot with the Canon 5D Mark IV and the Sigma 24–70mm Art lens, this scene challenged me to balance light and shadow in an environment where every photon counts. Street photography, after all, is about seeing — truly seeing — and waiting for the light to tell its story.

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