Be patient The most important thing I’ve learnt about street photography is just how much of a difference patience can make. While the ability to respond quickly is key to capturing a spontaneous situation, being able to foresee a moment and waiting for that critical point takes discipline.
This could be waiting for someone to pass by and their shadow to be perfectly placed in the frame, or the right expression to appear on someone’s face, or something else. Often the difference between nailing an image and just getting something that’s part of the way there is down to perseverance more than enything else.
Think long term
It’s useful to think how an image is likely to be viewed in years to come, as there’s a chance it may be.
Key things to look out for are elements that will easily date the image. You may want to deliberately include these so that the image can be seen as a representing a particular point in time. Alternatively, you may wish to leave them out so that your image doesn't date as quickly.
Out on the street, images that contain logos, vehicles and particular fashions will date faster than straightforward portraits, or images that contain buildings and natural elements.
Thinking about what falls into which camp can help you out years down the line if you want to use your image in a different way to that which you originally intended (such as stock photography).
Switch to manual or back-button focus
Autofocus using the standard shutter-release button method is ideal for most situations, but switching to manual or back-button focus can provide practical and creative advantages.
Focusing your lens manually may give you an alternative way of looking at things to the just having your camera immediately focus on a key subject in the scene.
You might, for example, choose to focus on another element in the scene to the one you originally anticipated, leaving the main subject out of focus and placing more focus on its shape and relationship to everything else in the image, rather than on its details.
People work well for this technique as their shape of their bodies is difficult to mistake for something else when out of focus.
Prefocusing on the scene, either by using manual focus or using back-button focus, will also ensure that your camera isn't hunting around at the critical point of capture. This is particular useful whenever people or other subjects are likely to pass in front of the main subject, or when shooting through an obstruction such as a set of railings.
Don't assume everything needs to be captured from the street itself
Street photography may depict life on the streets of a particular city or town, but that doesn’t mean you yourself need to be on the street.
Most images are either captured roughly at eye level or towards the ground, the latter being particularly useful for capturing dogs, birds or people sitting – but if you look through some of the most striking images you might notice that many break from this.
Indeed, many might be strong images primarily because the perspective is so different to that which we expect. So, the lesson here is to think outside the box and develop a new one.
Instead of using a 35mm lens and getting up close, you could set yourself up on a bridge and focus into the distance with a telephoto lens, or shoot from a building looking directly down on the street.
Shooting through a window from inside a building can give you a natural frame to work with, or reflections which can mingle with elements outside.
Capturing an image from a car or another moving vehicle, meanwhile, can introduce motion to your shots and make them more dynamic.
Combining one of these with a further technique, such as a long exposure or a multiple exposure, can make such an image all the more interesting.
Shoot in the worst conditions
We’re often told that early morning or late afternoon, when the sun is low in the sky and flatters a subject, is the best time for photography.
For a landscape or portrait this may well be ideal, but for an image out on the street you should learn to embrace every other occasion.
Harsh, midday sun, for example, can be great for high-contrast black-and-white images. Shooting while it's raining, or just after it has rained, gives you water droplets and puddles to work with, and potentially higher contrast from surfaces that have become wet too.
Particularly awful weather might animate people more as they rush around to look for shelter, and you may also get huge splashes of water from vehicles.
Obviously you need to make sure your kit is sufficiently protected if shooting in these conditions, but if you persevere you may well end up with something you couldn’t have otherwise captured.
. digitalrev.com2017-7-7 03:00
