Street Photography, Ghana.

I got a notification my phone’s memory was getting full yesterday and decided to clear up some space today. I was honestly shocked when I got the notification because I thought a 256GB memory was “unlimited”. Turn out, it’s not, thanks to my reckless usage.

Anyways, the quest to clear up some storage turned into something else when I came across a picture I took like 2 years back on my iPhone X. I took it on a Friday just as we were leaving the jummah prayer. I guess I’ve been doing this random photo taking thing for a long time. Anyways, the picture looks pretty decent for an iPhone X. Not that I’m underrating it’s ability or anything, just surprised at how good it came out relative to pictures I take on my current phone.

So I decided to dig some more to see if I could dust off some old-but-gold pictures. That wasn’t what happened. I didn’t find a lot of old pictures, but I did find that I’ve had some pictures that would make a nice street photography collection.

The pictures are from very different locations and I’ll indicate the location for each picture. The first one of the bicycles was taken in Savelugu in December 2021. This is how bicycles that are for sale are displayed around here - park over gutters with the front tyres resting against the gutter’s edge new the road side. This allows passer-bys (who are most likely the target audience) see the bicycles displayed.

For the second photo, I’n taking you back to Navrongo to my University days. I’m not sure exactly what @nhaji01 and I were shopping for, but I remember were in the market for her to gather some stuff to take home because they were on vacation. It was the last day we were both together as students.

I’m starting to remember something like the lady here was selling the beans to us. I was surprised to find that she measures the bowl of beans like we do back at home - she measured a bowl full, and fetched some extra with her hand supporting it to give as sort of customer discount.

This picture here, I took when @thisisnativeboy and I were headed for a Tamale Connect meetup around Tamale Technical University. We didn’t know the place, so we stopped here to ask the basketball coach for directions. The floor was wet because it had just rained. The weather was very good and I felt it was a perfect opportunity to take this shot.

I shared a similar version of this picture a few days ago in this post but when I was talking about the struggle of market women in that post, I forgot to mention how they’re risking their lives both under this overhead and near a busy road. It represents a glimpse of struggle around my part of the world.

Here’s another picture I took in Navrongo. In fact, I think this was among the first outdoor pictures I took when I just got this phone. I took this picture a day after I got my phone, so you could call this the camera test picture. As you see, I obviously loved the results.

When I went to Savelugu just after we left school in October last year, I made a trip to the towns local market and had an unpleasant experience. The market wasn’t looking good on a sanitary POV. But didn’t really surprise me because the community sanitary workers (called zoomlion around here) here get paid for doing nothing. And the worst part is that the traders pay tax every market day and you wonder what all that is used for.

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