Hitting The Street...

You've got your camera and you're all set to hit the streets to venture into your first foray of street photography. Good places to start out, especially if you're a bit nervous are street events like block parties, "farmers" markets, and festivals. In those environments, people with cameras aren't that unusual. They general offer a lot of great photo opportunities as people check out the stalls, enjoy the music, sample the "eats", etc. There are also vendors, musicians, and other performers to photograph. Also if you tend to frequent events that occur repeatedly, people become used to seeing you there and you become less noticeable. You can either find a spot to sit and wait for things to happen around you, or you can walk around looking for moments worth photographing. Whichever you decide you always need to have your camera ready, especially when walking around, since great moments happen quickly. If you're not ready, you'll end up telling people about that great shots you missed, instead of showing the great moments you captured.

Best Friends

Did You Hear The One About..

But wait... hold on a moment! You need to be able to notice and recognize those moments worth photographing as they happen, or even before they happen. This means you need to learn how to be an observer. Take some time, without your camera, to observe life on the streets. Be aware of your surroundings, the colors, shapes, light, and shadows. Look at the people, how they're dressed, how they appear, how they act and react to their surroundings, and how they act and react among and to each other. Don't just focus on someone or some scene that's happening in front of you. Look beyond the foreground. Often we're so focused on the "subject" we miss something important or interesting or whimsical going on in the background.

The Music Men

Whose Shoes?

Don't look for what you think are great photographs, just look! Life is happening around you, almost every moment that you observe is unplanned, spontaneous. Most people pass through those moments without noticing them.  Until you recognize those moments without a camera in your hand, you're not ready. As you spend time looking, you'll learn to see, and you'll recognize those special moments that are magical and capture them in a way that makes them more than just a photograph. That moment you captured on film or digital should give us something more than a person walking down the street, or two people having lunch at an outdoor café. That photograph should speak to us, it might tell us a story, offer us an insight, or create an emotional reaction within us. Color, Light, shape, and composition are all important, but in the end, it's all about that one frozen moment in time, that you bring life in that photograph, making that "ordinary" moment extraordinary.

Street Photography - Getting Started

The Go Club

Street Photography is about capturing something that occurs in moments that vanish almost as soon as they happen. It's not like landscape photography where you have time to set up your camera to get the shot exactly like you want it. It's not like portrait photography where you have control over everything from the lighting to the pose. Street photography is capturing moments in urban or suburban settings, often in the midst of chaos. Scenes are often moving and changing, people are acting and interacting and reacting, even when they are sitting still. In the time it takes you to figure out the proper f stop and shutter speed, focus and compose, the moments will be gone. So it's important understand the "technicals" of your camera, and have your camera pre-set so that you're prepared to catch those moments as they happen.

"The best camera is the one you have with you." - Chase Jarvis

That's 100% true. It doesn't matter if you use a "point and shoot" or an expensive DSLR or a camera on your phone. What matters, in the end, is the photograph. A great image can come from any camera because what makes a great photograph isn't just technical quality. What makes a photograph great is mostly how it affects us. Does it tell a story, does it "touch" us, does it awaken a memory, is it inspiring, or whimsical, or shocking, or dramatic, or romantic? That's how it is with street photography. It's not just people walking down the street. Great street photography can tells us something about life, or fill us with an emotion, or make us curious, or give us an insight. It's the moment that matters, the camera is just a tool to preserve that moment.

 

Waiting For A Treat

Reflection

"Point and shoots" and phone cameras do a pretty good job of getting the right exposure. Camera phones are becoming more sophisticated and allow more control over shutter speeds and exposure. Up-to-date point and shoots even have modes that allow you to change aperture, shutter speed, and ISO. You'll want a fast shutter speed to "freeze" movement, along with a small aperture to achieve enough depth of field to have the scene in focus and add context. When in doubt, there's nothing wrong with setting your camera in "P" or "Program" mode and letting your camera make the technical choices for you. With street photography, you need to be able to get that camera to your eye, focus, compose, and shoot, before the moment is gone forever. Don't get me wrong, image quality is important, but a high quality photo without great subject, interest, story, and composition, is pretty useless if all you have is a sharp, well lit image with nothing to see. As far as lenses go, a "purist" street photographer might insist you use a wide angle lens between 20-35 mm that forces you to get close to the subject. If you feel more secure and less noticeable with a longer focal length, like an 18-135mm, giving you more of a "safe zone" to ensure that the scene and subject remains natural, that's fine.

Dress to blend in and don't carry a hundred pounds of equipment along with you. Choose your camera and lens for the day and leave the rest behind. The idea is to be discrete and unnoticed to capture what's happening "unfiltered" and unpoised. When you head into large, urban areas, bring a friend, it affords a bit of safety and may help you be less conspicuous. To keep from being noticed when photographing people, try not to make eye contact before you bring the camera to your eye, and don't make eye contact after taking the photo. Keep the camera to your eye and pan around continuing to shoot, or act as if you're photographing something else, before you take the camera down. If you are noticed before taking the photo, and someone objects to having their photograph taken... don't take it! If you take someone's photo and they notice, and they want you to delete it... delete it. It's not worth an argument or a confrontation.

Brisk Morning Walk On The Bridge

"To me, photography is an art of observation. It’s about finding something interesting in an ordinary place… I’ve found it has little to do with the things you see and everything to do with the way you see them.” - Elliott Erwitt

Street photography isn't just a way of documenting, it's a way of seeing and experiencing life as it happens. It's capturing life without interrupting or influencing it, and it's not possible to do it with permission. For the beginner, this makes street photography terrifying, and you have to be willing to push yourself out of the boundaries of comfort to be successful at it.

Street Photography - Color or Black & White?

Ride Like The Wind

“When you photograph people in color, you photograph their clothes. But when you photograph people in black and white, you photograph their souls!” - Ted Grant, Canadian photojournalist

The Long Walk Home

Love in the Night

When it comes to street photography, the inevitable question is "color" or "black & white". When one looks at street photography through the years, you will primarily see monochrome images. Street photography emerged in the days of film, when black and white film was less expensive and easier to develop than color film. As a result, street photography and black and white (monochrome) images became inexorably connected. Since street photography primarily focuses on people and moments of living, it became widely accepted that the benefit of shooting in monochrome was removing the distration caused by colorful objects. By eliminating the color, you're drawing attention the people, their interaction, or the story in that moment.

Taking A Stand

Alone

With the advent of digital photography, more color street photography has been appearing, and is perfectly acceptable. When does color benefit street photography? When color is part of the story. But color can be distracting, and your subject can be lost in the color as your eyes are drawn away by more colorful objects. There should be a clear purpose for color in a street photo. If color doesn't add anything to your photo, then go with monochrome.

My preference, since I'm generally shooting digital, is to shoot RAW, which gives me the option to choose color or monochrome when post processing. I tend to lean towards monochrome because it reduces the scene to content, structure and emotions, which is most important to me. I feel it forces the viewer to see a different visual perception of the scene without the "cuteness" or "whimsy" that color can falsely suggest in some photographs. Reducing a street photo to monochrome brings out a depth  that may be completely overlooked in color.

The choice of color or monochrome is really up to you. In the end, you're shooting for you first, so you have to choose the option which best reflects your vision.

Why Street Photography?

Playtime

I've been photographing things ever since I was about 9 years old, with my first camera, which was a KodaK Brownie. Time with the family, at picnics, on vacations, during birthdays, with camera in hand, made me an observer. Over the years photography became less about capturing moments in my life, and more about documenting life happening around me. It's about finding those ordinary moments that provide a glimpse of who we are or how we go about living our lives. Moments in street photography just happen, they can't be contrived, or prepared. Unlike portraiture or commercial photography, street photographers are walking around in the world, without an agenda, waiting for that special moment, and 99% of the time you miss it! That's what makes street photography most difficult, it's about catching those unrehearsed moments that have meaning or tell a story.

Enter the Dragon

I'm always happy to answer questions and offer tips when asked. If you'd like to see more examples of street photography, here are links to several photographers, whose street photography has influenced me, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Helen Levitt, Vivian Maier

Starting Out

Love on the Bridge

Welcome to Chasing The Street. I chose this title for my blog mainly because of my passion for street photography. You can be sure I'll be sharing my photos, and passing on my knowledge and insights about photography. But "Chasing the street", like street photography, is about life, so posts may focus on other things, like growing up in a small town, memories of double features at the local theatre, grandkids, caring for an aging parent, and other things that I hope readers will find interesting. thought provoking, or maybe even inspiring. Expect to see one new post per week.

I live in Phoenixville, a small town in southeastern Pennsylvania that began life as an industrial and manufacturing center. Times have changed though. "Mom and Pop" shops downtown vanished with the appearance of the malls and industry declined with the changes in the economy. Phoenixville is revitalizing and growing, with microbreweries, popular restaurants, and vintage clothing stores boosting the economy. The "centerpiece" of the town though, will always be the Colonial Theatre. Once an Opera House, and featuring performers like Harry Houdini, the Colonial became famous for it's part in the 1958 film "The Blob".

Phoenixville is divided by the French Creek, which flows into the Schuylkill River, and splits the town into north and south sides. The bridge in the photo above, is one of two bridges connecting both sides of the town. The photo is looking south, towards the downtown district. It gives you a tiny hint of what life might be like in a small town. A couple, holding hands, are heading downtown and you have to believe they must be in love. The buildings haven't changed much from when I was a kid, walking or riding my bike, heading for the Saturday double feature at the Colonial. I want my street photos to tell a story, or show a little slice of life. I'll leave it up to you to decide what the story is in this one. Until next time...