Strolling and Street Art in Sheffield

We went to Yorkshire Cosplay Con in Sheffield a few weeks ago so Phillip could do his thing and take lots of awesome cosplay photos (check out his ColobusYeti Instagram feed to see some of his work!). He got two press passes so I went along as the plus one. Now I like a little manga, anime and sci-fi, 2 days of it though is kinda not my thing. So one of the days I took myself exploring the streets of Sheffield so I could see some of its famed street art. Visual art means lots of photos and not so many words…a change from many of my posts. Hope you enjoy!

 

Charles Street:

 

Brown Lane:

 

Brown Street:

On the wall of the Rutland Arms

 

Sidney Street:

Even the skips are arty!

 

Sylvester Street car park:

 

Arundel Street:

 

Here I found a suitable arty place to stop for lunch called ‘The Holt‘ where I had a rather scrumptious TLT (smoked tofu, lettuce and tomatoes with vegan mayo) and a lovely soy cappuccino.

 

 

Street art is not for everyone and some will see this as plain old grafitti possibly. I’m not a fan of someone simply lazily spraying their name without any real effort put in to it. This though felt like it gave character and life to this part of Sheffield and I for one loved it.

Harry Brearley – inventor of stainless steel

 

 

Discovering a love of urban photography

I didn’t really start wanting to take ‘proper’ photographs until I was in my thirties.  Sure I took holiday photos and snapped away at events such as birthdays or whenever one of my pets did something fun/cute.  Nothing serious though.  My interest was created when Phillip aka ColobusYeti started taking photography seriously and I saw how good the photos he was producing were.  Mine seemed so poor next to his!  So I bought myself a decent camera and got photographing.

Over time I started getting a feel for the type of photographs I enjoyed taking – landscapes, bare trees in winter, small or quirky details that I would spot in the world around me.  Not people though…no no no…definitely not for me!  I liked taking photographs and playing around with them on Lightroom, did I love it though?  No that did not happen until our travels and I fell in love with urban photography.  And I fell hard.

I had often dabbled with urban photography, yet it wasn’t really until we lived in Tokyo for 6 months though and I walked the streets exploring the city I had fallen in love with that I really felt that this was me, this was what I wanted to photograph.  Cities, buildings, streets – all that evidence of people’s lives and impact on their surroundings is simply, well inspiring to me.  So I thought I would share some of my favourites from my travels – hope you enjoy them.

Oh yes…and I also discovered how much I like black and white photography….