Street photography: thoughts + tips + analysis
Is shooting from the hip a good way to take street photos? Such an innocent question! The answer is yes. And no. In thinking about it very carefully and weighing up the arguments for and against I find myself questioning the very purpose, essence and philosophy of street photography: its ethics, its aesthetics, its whatever. … Read more
On the day after Twelfth Night the weather was dull, the light fading, and the Christmas lights had just been switched off. People seemed not to have recovered from their New Year’s hangovers. The chances of getting a good street photo in these circumstances were low, to say the least. I was quite right. People … Read more
If you’ve fallen in love with street photography you may have a nagging feeling that you need to buy a new camera to help you get better shots. What happens next? The next step is to start gathering information. My favourite strategy is to spend a lot of time examining and comparing sample photos from … Read more
There’s a school of thought which says the best compositions are the tried and tested ones, but another which insists on the need to be creative and avoid the obvious. Who’s right? And why? No art form can advance if all the people who practice it merely adhere to a set of rules, however sensible … Read more
One of those silly “rules of thumb” in street photography is: “You can never get too close.” I think you can, but I’m not going to show any examples of it here. There’s close and there’s too close. We need to define which is which. My personal view is that “too close” is when the … Read more
I recently watched a YouTube video by Thomas Leuthard entitled “23 Ninja Tips For Your Next Photo Walk,” no.23 of which was: “Don’t overcook your photos with too much editing. If you can tell what photoshopping tools were used, you’ve used too much.” My inner ninja started wondering if this is true — and if … Read more
The answer is: to escape! Having just taken a picture of people about to cross the road, I don’t really want to hang around for objections, so I cross the road in the opposite direction and make a safe retreat. The technique works best when you’re sporting a medium telephoto, such as a 50mm on … Read more
If your first instinct is always to place the subject in the middle of the photo, think again. It’s often better in street photography to tuck the subject off to the left or the right, allowing the rest of the picture to counterbalance the composition. I’m not talking about those impromptu street portraits which may … Read more
Here’s a Long List of candidates. Drama, humour, colour, depth, eye-catching interest, facial expressions, sharp focus, balance, frame-filling content, texture, beauty (“Did someone say beauty? What do you think this is? Art? Get the hell outta here!”) clarity, mystery (“Can you have clarity and mystery in the same image?”) mean-streets grittiness, energy, decisive moments… Oh, … Read more
All street photographers experience the moment when, having noticed a subject some distance away, they take the shot — only to find that three-quarters of the photo holds little or no visual interest. One solution is to crop the image, reframing it exactly as you’d wish. Sure, that means throwing away several million pixels — … Read more