“Build character”
Two powerful words that will help us define our street photography. Photography is always part of art, and for me, to have character when create art is more important than to achieve perfect technicalities.
Do not strive to create 100% perfect-in-anything kind of images, instead, focus on build strong artistic character based on our artistic mind. For me try to create 100% perfect images is like:
“They are the straight-A student who doesn’t have any hobbies, the person who is good at everything, but doesn’t have any foibles or quirks.” – Anonymous
While they are good at following “rules” to achieve perfection, they might be lost their true character as well. They do everything to get perfection, even if it means they need to do something they dislike.
Personally, flaw is not always a bad thing. Some said that have flaw means we will understand our weakness, and we can learn from it to become better. That is very true, flaw makes us stronger. Also, more often than not, in world of art flaw may helps to create a certain character that mirror artist’s mind:
Colour too vivid? vs Too subtle?
Contrast too strong? vs Too soft?
Grainy image vs super clean image?
Subject is blurry (from motion effect) vs tack sharp image?
Soft focus vs Sharp focus?
Overexpose vs Underexpose image?
What if we checked all of technical side, is it become a better image compare if a photo have any of flaws above?
Is a tack sharp image always become a better version of the blurry one? I believe the answer is NO. Simply because a good street photograph is the one who can evoke our emotion. Not the one who has the sharpest, cleanest, and have 100% accurate colours.
Also, even though that “too much” of something may not good in real life matters, in world of art, it could be a sign of build a certain character. Most important is we able to create “harmony” between each elements inside our photo. Harmony here means to blend multiple elements (form, colours, and composition) in artistic way.
Who can define that an image is artistic or not? We may seek answer by ask about it to some photographers that we like (that may inspire us), or ask openly in social media to anyone. However, always remember that ultimately we still need to ask ourself to decide. I believe artistic mind could be influence by the way we think, the way we see the wold, and as reflection of our life’s experience. Each person may have different opinion about the meaning of word “artistic” itself.
Street photography require us to create artistic images, not high accurate information. We can consider some distortion, noise, colour shift, blurry object, over/under exposed image as good elements inside our photo.
Personally, when I was start doing street photography, my opinion about artistic image is about people. I love to documenting street portrait (both with and without permission). However, since around a year ago I’m more attracted to diagonal line, strong contrast light (to create silhouette or shadow), framing objects, and reflection surface more and more.
I do still think capture people’s emotion is still artistic, but beautiful light fall-off and dynamic lines are more pleasing to look at for my current mind. So, always adjust our artistic taste based on our current preference, shoot what we love, even if it means we need to change our shooting style. (Read: We can learn new things to develop new style, which is great.)
How to create a character?
Same like we build our personal character, it develops from experience and daily habit. To create our own “character” in photograph, at first we should find a style that we really (REALLY) love it.
How to find a style that we love? In short answer: Try it yourself!
Experiment with our shooting style. Experiment to create a certain type of photo that we never created before (simple example: If we always shoot in black and white, then start to only shoot in colour everyday for a month).
Then we need to always try to practise it in real life. It does not matter how much photography article we read out there, none of them will give great help to create a character in our photograph, unless we start do shooting to find our own “special style”.
Learn street photography by practise it everyday if able. Try to find a little spare time in the middle of our daily activities. Even 30 minutes of practise a day is always better than nothing. Dare to experiment with our shooting style, who knows if we may like a certain new style after we tried it ourself.
Be bold, and shooting everyday,
Nico Harold