This is a photograph that has been shot with a Canon 6D and a Tamron 24-70 2.8 lens, in Rethymno, Crete, Greece.

When I’m out on the streets with my camera for hours at a time I can sometimes find that I get really demoralised. Some days I just won’t ‘see’ anything happening that makes a good street photo. Note how I put ‘see’ in inverted commas – I personally believe a great street photographer will always be able to find something happening in the street and use their ‘vision’ to create a great shot. But unfortunately I have days sometimes where my photographer’s eye is a little cloudy! I also have days where I’m just unlucky – I’ll miss shots through timing – a perfect subject will arrive at a scene too fast before I’m able to frame properly, or something will happen that disrupts my shot. The day I shot this photo was just one of those days. I was feeling very annoyed and frustrated with the work I was producing, and nothing seemed to be going ‘right’. I was also feeling creatively at a very low ebb – we’d just had the craziness of the carnival in Rethymno and I’d been experimenting with new techniques using an off-camera flash – post carnival I didn’t want to go back to making ‘boring’ shots that I felt like I’d made a hundred times before.

This is a photograph that has been shot with a Canon 6D and a 16-35mm f/2.8 L Canon lens, in Rethymno, Crete, Greece.

Fellow street hunter Spyros Papaspyropoulos and I have been very busy recently shooting loads of street photos. It’s currently the height of the Greek carnival season in our town of Rethymno, which means the place is a real hive of activity. Thursday 12th February was the Greek celebration of Tsiknopempti (Τσικνοπέμπτη), which literally translates as Smokey Grilled Meat Thursday! Greeks traditionally all head out on this night and eat loads of meat, in preparation for the coming fasting of lent before the Easter celebrations (98% of Greece’s 10.7m population is classed as Greek Orthodox). Spyros and I shot lots of interesting photos from that night which we’ll be sharing very soon, but I wanted my first weekly pic to commemorate an even more surreal event that happened on the Saturday following  ‘Smokey Meat Thursday’.