Street portrait is type of street photography that focus on extracting story or capturing character of a person (or group of people) that we meet in public space. Usually, I also called is as Documenting Human life, because our main intention is to make a documentary of our subject’s life.
In my street portrait style, my focus is to show my subject’s character, so I can create a storyline based on their presences. There are some points that we need to know to shoot street portrait, to be able to extract a character and story from a person (or group of people):
Gesture
Create a storyline based on what our subject was doing at that moment. It could be while they were smoking, talking, or doing anything that require them to move their neck, hands or legs.
Photograph a person who “busy” about something. Add one or more elements inside photo that show our subject is in the middle of an activity.
A little tips, I like to shoot a person who try to light their cigarette. They would created a certain hand gesture and most of them would focus on their cigarette, so they would not notice if being photographed.
Outfit
Outfit is not necessary only about what they wear, but also any accessories that they carried at that time. Pick a stood out subject by looking a person who wear/bring something unique or different than the rest of people surround him/her.
As you might already read my article Shoot Umbrella (Read here), I have “soft spot” to anyone who bring umbrella, I always find them as an attractive subject to be photographed.
Pay more attention to little detail, texture, and colour match. We do not need to always shoot the whole body or outfit of a person, could be just part of them, that we think has the most attractive part.
Just do not forget that when we want to create street portrait shoot, make sure we still focus on capturing character from subject itself. Outfit and accessories are only things that help to enhance subject’s character.
Face expression
Face expression will show our subjects’ true emotion at the moment we photograph them candidly. We want to extract subjects’ character based on their real emotion. Click our camera shutter right before they able to change their face expression after saw a camera pointed at them.
Try to create a photo with main point of interest in subject’s face. Make audience easily focus or see subject’s face even if they only look at our photo in a split second. Shooting from medium to close distance is usually a better way to capture people’s face emotion as we can see the detail of their faces clearer.
Eye contact
Read here about my thought of shooting “eye contact”
Eye contact is such an important element here, it will add more drama, tense and pressure to viewers. Feels like we put audience on our feet when we were capturing subject inside our photo.
My basic tips to hunt for eye contact is by shooting like we are in the middle of recording a video. Means, we keep our camera standby on our hand and start to walk to get closer to subject, keep snap a photo till we passed our subject and do not make any direct eye contact with them.
This way, most people will think that we photograph something behind them, and their curiosity about what we were doing will make them looking straight to our camera.
Street Portrait with permission
Photograph a stranger by ask permission before we start to take a shoot. I’m fully aware that it is still controversial, even till today, whether this type of photography could be considered as street photography or not.
For me, while subject knows they were being photographed, there are still some (candid) points that we can not control such as:
- We do not know whether they will agree to be photographed or not
- We can not control their outfit at the moment we shoot them
- We can not control most of lighting source (not use proper flash stand or softbox)
- We can not control what kind of emotion that they will show to us (example: When told them to not smile, there are still many many other face expression that they could gave to us).
Why with permission?
Because I feel their appearance is really attractive or unique, and I want to capture even the smallest detail about their “looks”. I need to get close to them and have a proper spare time to decide which angle that I will like the most. Can not do this without permission, even if I can get close to them, they will move too fast for me to photograph them “properly”.
In the photo above, notice there are traditional javanese script (Known as Aksara Jawa, check wikipedia here) on his mask, which is the main reason I felt so attracted to photograph him!
Culture
One of the biggest benefit of doing street portrait is I will able to documenting more of people’s culture in a certain country.
For example like two photos above, it is about how people dress up as the effect of majority religion in their country. Thailand is about Buddhist and Indonesia is about Moslem.
That is all of my thought about shooting street portrait on the street. Feel free to start your own portrait project of strangers out there.
After all, this “genre” is the main reason I started street photography: To documenting people’s activities in decisive moment.
Notes:
Watch more at corner area of our frame (for any distractive elements). Means, do not shoot busy background, therefore our subject will look “stood out” inside our frame. Avoid any distractive elements as much as possible (Read here).
Keep shooting and have fun in street photography!
Nico Harold