Street Art Contest #200 Documenting a graffiti artist at work!

Hello street art fans!

This is number 200 of the CCC street art contest! And I think that needs to be a special post!
I was wondering around the city of Ghent in Belgium and discovered so many nice places where they made street art! The city is really invested very good in getting the best artist from all over the world to make some beautiful art in the city!

And tourism knows that! There are various tours that you can book, for example on a bicycle or simply on foot! then you will get a tour from local street artists and they will know where to find the most beautiful works of art to show you! I didn't book a tour, I always take my own bike with on my van! I will drive around the city on my own and discover it like that!

The place in this post is very popular in the city of Ghent! Its the very famous Graffiti alley!
It's just as the name say's! An alley full of graffiti! And when I drove trough it, I was very lucky that there were graffiti artist working on there piece!

I started talking to them and asked if I could take pictures of them! I told him that I wanted to practice making documentaries style pictures that told a nice story about interesting people on the streets! He agreed and we got to work! This is him, GBN Signalnoise!
He was working on a new piece together with his friend Steven

He made a little joke about getting his face on the internet by putting a black can of pain in front of his eyes! That immediately broke the ice a bit and made the shoot go very smooth!

This is part of the alley!

I wanted to focused on documenting the whole process but he already started a while ago! I just stepped in and started looking around! Spray cans and nozzels were laying all over the place so I tried to make still lifes pictures of them!

It was also a good chance for me to get used to the light conditions in the alley! The sun was almost setting and it was pretty dark in there! I had to use ISO settings of more that 2500!

But my main goal was to get pictures of them working on there art!
And that was challenging in a narrow alley like this!

There were people every where! But that was also challenging to try and capture that!

And for me, as a landscape photographer, it is very familiar to get those wide shots! But I wanted to learn to get closer on the action!

I am very proud of these three pictures! Dove deep in the action! I love the story here, tattooed, smoking and paint on his hands!

Details in the surroundings are also important in a documentary!

I really loved to do this! I learned so much here! Especially to look around! What is important? What do I want to show you? What is good for story telling? All these things came together in this shoot! And of course camera settings! It got dark pretty quickly and that was extremely challenging for me! But also nice for the documentary! It tells you that it takes a long time to make an art piece like this!

This was a very educational experience for me! And I am also very happy with the result! And now the hardest part! Witch picture shall I use for the contest? Like I said, they tell a story all together! Let me know what you think witch picture I should use!

Thank you for reading my post! And if you want to see all the places I have ever been to, just click on my Pinmapple profile!

And if you want to follow my daily life, I often post stories and pictures off all the tings I do in life on my Instagram account!