About

Via Vignettes Website

SantaFe 057 cSo why is a street photography site called “Via Vignettes”? Via can be translated in Latin for the word street, as well as passage or way. Vignette is defined by Collins Dictionary as “A short description, picture, or piece of acting which expresses very clearly and neatly the typical characteristics of the thing that it represents”. Using these two terms together feels  appropriate for this site, considering the content and my mission for my street photography.

Brandon Jackson (Me)

usI got my start in photography in 1987 while in high school. Shooting portraits and headshots has always been my primary focus but over the past few years I’ve been exploring street and editorial photography. In 2022 I retired from healthcare education and then Carmen and I moved to Valencia, Spain. There are many reasons we love living here and for me, Valencia offers amazing scenery, light, and character that begs to be captured in camera. I still shoot headshots, portraits, and fashion images, and you can see that work at brandonjacksonphoto.com

The Gear

 

a7rIIII have used a lot of different camera systems over the past 30+ years and my current kit includes two Sony A7rIII camera bodies and several prime lenses. Most of my street images you’ll see here on this site were shot with an A7rIII and a Sony 35mm 1.8 lens. There are also several images shot with Samyang’s 45mm 1.8 AF lens. This was my “go to” lens for street images with my Sony cameras as it is very light, small, and makes lovely images, especially wide open. I would still be using it, but I found it was a bit “longer” than I liked for narrower streets and such. That’s when I switched to the Sony 35mm 1.8.

The Sony 35mm 1.8 lens ticks all the right boxes for my style of street shooting. This mild wide angle suits working in closer quarters and the 1.8 aperture is bright enough to work in very low light along with the A7rIII’s good low light image quality. This lens is lightweight and compact which is perfect carrying around all day mounted on the A7rIII body.

Before standardizing on this camera/lens combination, I used an Olympus E-PL3 and a Panasonic 20mm 1.7 lens kit. I later updated this to an E-PL7 body and both served me well. Eventually I ran into enough instances where I wanted to crop more than I could get away with from the Micro Four-Thirds sensor in those cameras.

You’ll see a handful of images in the Lisbon gallery that were all shot with the Fujfilm X20 compact camera. I really enjoyed shooting with this small camera, but I preferred having a screen I could flip up to shot with for street shooting which is when I started using the E-PL series Olympus cameras.