Personally street photography is a super fun activity and also help me a lot to develop my self in better way. I do really encourage people around me to do street photography (Either a person who do photography for living, or anyone who only shoot casually from their phone).
Related article: Why (keep) shooting street photography?
What is the “easiest” way to learn and do street photography?
A question that I heard a lot actually. Mind you, if I am being brutally honest, there is no shortcut in photography, especially in street photography. Simply because what we need to capture is an interesting moment that about to happen. We can not make our own scene. Most moments out there happen in split second and out of our control .
In this blog post, I will try to simplified things that we need to do to start street photography in these 10 points. I hope it would become easier to accept for people out there (our friends, family, partner, etc) who want to try street photography. We all like easy steps at the beginning, don’t we?
1. Shoot with smartphone or (cheap) small camera
Never let tools prevent you to not start shooting on the street today! (or Now!). Grab your smartphone, or any cameras lying around you (even the cheapest camera in market is totally fine), step outside, and start click your shutter. Personally, even my old phone Samsung Galaxy S7 is capable enough for street photography even though it is already 3 years old. Let alone any high end modern smartphone like iPhone XS, Huawei P30, or Samsung Galaxy S10.
“Lucky us” in street photography, the content quality inside our frame is much more important than the image quality itself. Bring the most expensive DSLR camera surely will give us better image quality, but also has major drawback like size, weight, and harder to carry around everyday. Unique moments happen everyday and everywhere, have no camera with you means you lose chance to capture them.
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How to choose camera for street photography
2. Daylight time
Still related to the previous point. By shooting at daylight we can have relatively high shutter speed to prevent movement’s shake (unless that’s what exactly we want to do to create creative effect). Even the cheapest kit lens would provide us aperture like f4 or f5.6, which is in daylight time we easily can achieve shutter speed at 1/400s or faster.
Daylight time also provide us more various type of lighting that we can use to create creative visual arts like diagonal line, shadow, silhouette and reflection.
3. Shoot at crowded place
First world problem of a person who start shoot street photography: How to shoot stranger from close distance? How to become “Ninja” so people will not notice me took photograph of them?
Personally, the easiest way is start shoot at crowded place like tourism place, traditional market, or busy street right after/before office hour.
The key is, in crowded place we will let stranger to enter our frame by their own will, instead of we hunt them to get into our frame. Just use camera’s LCD screen and walk while pointing your camera forward. Start click shutter to any interesting subjects, and once you click shutter to capture a scene, keep focus on your camera’s screen and walk away instead of put your camera down. This method will confuse people whether you photograph them or something behind them.
4. Focus on one style at a time
There are plenty style of street photography, and plenty type of great moments out there. “Restrict” our mind so we can focus on things that we truly like.
In my own experience, I always think that shoot in colour is harder to do than shoot black and white. Therefore, I start to train my mind to focus on shoot in colour for a certain period of time, so I can let my mind understand about colour match better.
Shooting in colour definitely has different requirement compare to shoot in black and white. If I let my self always switch colour or BW in my camera when shooting, then it would be harder for me learn about colour match. Simply because I will let my mind fall to my comfort zone (shoot in black and white).
The key point is, if we want to know how to create a better photo in colour, then start to force our mind either shoot in colour or do not shoot at all. I believe it will speed up our learning process.
Same happen with shooting reflection on the street. Some people ask me how can I notice there are things that able to become reflective objects? The answer is, reflective objects are everywhere, it is just up to us whether we specifically looking for it or not.
Fun challenge:
Try to shoot only reflection for a week or a month. Either you force yourself to find a reflective object, or do not take photo at all. Create a target, try to get at least one or two reflection photos a day.
Apply the same method to learn shoot silhouette, shadow, layering, framing, etc. Try to learn one style at a time.
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5. Shoot everyday
Still the fastest way to learn street photography. Create a habit of making creative photo everywhere and everyday. Also, by using your camera everyday will make you get used to your camera’s ability.
Best way to learn photography is simply by doing/experience it. Similar when we try to learn ride a bicycle or to swim. The more we do it, the better the results.
Try to shoot at working place. Either when we are about to work, in break (lunch) time or after work hour. In my experience 15-30 minutes of “hunting” street scene everyday is way better than not shooting at all.
6. Embrace bad photos
Bad photographs = sign of learning process
It doesn’t matter who you are, we all ever produced bad photos. Never feel discourage because of it. Try to analyse our own photos that we dislike. What make us think it is bad? How to avoid it next time? Do we need to change our camera setting? or our way of shooting? or any other factors that we need to change? Learn from our mistake usually teach us something really useful.
There are times when I took hundreds of photos when hunting on the street, and back home with not even single photo that I really like. It is a common thing in street photographer’s world.
7. Social media is source of inspiration
Whenever we need a new idea to shoot on the street, feel free to get many inspirational photos in social media. Analyse photos that we like, whether it is their colour scheme? unique composition? attractive gesture? etc. Try to “copy” them, blend it with our own style, and start to develop a certain style that reflect our artistic mind.
8. Work the scene
Every time we find an interesting spot to shoot, never only take one photo and go home. Always try to work the scene creatively like experiment with angles (extreme low/high/diagonally), or waiting for attractive subjects to enter our frame. If we do not have time at that moment, try to revisit that spot at the other day.
My usual waiting time is around 5-60 minutes at a spot. Longer than that, then I will prefer to revisit that place at other time. My general rule is I will take shoots until I really satisfied with the result, then try to add few more frames just in case I can photograph something that even more interesting.
9. Click first, think later!
Train our reflect and habit to always click camera shutter first before thinking. Snap anything that attract our eyes, even if only a slight. Thanks to today’s digital camera and cheap price of memory card, we easily able to shoot hundreds of photos everyday without limitation like in film camera.
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10. Train our mind by doing snapshot
Doing snapshot is all about shoot literally anything in this world (building, tree, people, plain wall, flower, etc) that we find as artistic object, whether in dynamic shape, deep story, or simply evoke our memories about something.
Do not thinking too much about genre when we are doing snapshot. As long as we find something interesting to photograph, just snap it. As simple as that.
It does not matter whether what we capture is in street photography genre or not, what important is we should review our own snapshot and analyse why we capture that image. Is it because the unique light falloff? Artistic colour scheme? Strong diagonal line? Unusual texture? etc. Try to apply that artistic object in our street photography.
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Train our mind by doing snapshot
That is all 10 points that I really hope able to help people start doing street photography as daily activity. Street photography should be fun, full of excitement (of random moments), and become the reflection of our artistic mind!
Keep shooting everyday,
Nico Harold