At the start of March myself and 3 of my good friends, and excellent photographers – Kristian, Ross and Sachin – headed off to Cuba for 2 weeks to divulge our passion for street photography. You may remember last year we went to Myanmar for 3 weeks and had an absolute blast. This trip was no different!

We started and finished the trip in Havana and spent the 10 days or so in between travelling all over the place. We managed to find a couple of days to chill but our intention is always to come home with a collection of photos we are proud of.

I personally found it much harder to get strong images from this trip and I’ll explain why. I like to document people doing things – it doesn’t matter what it is, whether it be religious practices, working, spending time with their family, etc, I just like to get in close and document people ‘doing’. The job situation in Cuba is very different to other parts of the world. Work is slow and sparse. We hardly saw any shops anywhere! With this in mind, to get strong photos you really have to approach Cuba differently. Thinking more about colours, shapes, shadows, highlights, patterns and just generally look for interesting compositions. Nothing makes you grow as a photographer like being pushed out of your comfort zone and this trip really did that for me. Don’t get me wrong, I’m really proud of the photos I came home with – particularly those in this blog post – but I really did find it tough.

Cuba is such a beautiful place and I’d urge anyone to go, especially now since the strict rules about tourism have been relaxed, before it becomes another Florida (!)

For the photographers – I only took my Fuji X-T1 and X-Pro1 on this trip, along with the 18mm, 23mm and 35mm. Everything in this blog post is shot on the X-T1 and 23mm. In my opinion that’s probably the best combination of lens and body for street photography ever.

Enjoy the photos and feel free to ask any questions in the comments below! :)