A small guide to Street Photography PT. 10
Starting with Street Photography…
Eje Central Lazaro Cardenas, Mexico City 2021
To become a real street photographer means accepting to enter into a long process of study and dedication. In my experience as a street photographer and photo trainer I can say that we need to live this way to make photography as an attitude and lifestyle. We should accept the idea a street photographer can not turn off the switch and being always ready to document a story in front of our eyes.
It is a long term process but I can recommend some things to do to speed up or facilitate this personal journey:
Before you even start with a camera document yourself: books and the internet are your allies. After all these years in-public is still the “first contact” website I recommend to my students. If you don’t know the masters, google: Henri Cartier Bresson, Helen Levitt, Joel Meyerowitz, Garry Winogrand, Lee Friedlander, William Klein, Robert Frank. You have already a good start-up.
Without stopping to document yourself you need to start to go out with your camera. What camera? Any camera is OK, also your mobile phone. But I recommend you to start with a camera allowing you manual settings. Try also a film camera: it is a great school if you have serious intentions with photography and the ideal condition to create a solid background.
In first instance go easy: use billboards to create juxtapositions and you will get invisibility photographing people in profile. Go to Downtown and prefer areas crowded with tourists.
Observe always a lot and learn from your errors: keep any picture. Don’t delete anything. In front of the monitor of your computer also the bad shots, those completely wrong can help you to understand and not repeating in future the errors. You can read the exif data to learn. You can do this also with the pictures of other photographers: flickr can be a great opportunity for this.
There are a lot of exercises you can do directly on the street: you can decide to stay in a corner where there is a lot of persons crossing. You can photograph a showcase, improving the composition and looking for the eye contact, better when you start because there is a mirror between your subject and you.
Use one camera, one lens. You don’t need something more than this: a 35mm lens or a 28mm lens is sufficient, believe me. And a fixed lens is a great “teacher” if you want to learn about composition.
You can decide to use only JPG if digital, or using just a roll, ASA 400 for example. Remember less is more, always to improve as a photographer.
Stop to think about gear and to the next camera. Street Photography is not about the camera but about the ideas and the ability of the photographer to capture a moment with a story. I know cameras are beautiful toys and nothing wrong with to be as a child when you buy a new camera, but stop to be obsessed with this. It is better to save money for books and new destinations where you can photograph.
Calle Donceles, Mexico City 2021
THE GREAT MESSAGE FROM THE MASTERS
Garry Winogrand, one of my favorites, is famous for having exposed three rolls of Kodak TRI-X black and white film (but he photographed also in color) on the streets of New York City every day of his life. This means 100 pictures a day, 36,500 a year, a million every 30 years. Winogrand died relatively young in 1984 leaving more than 2500 rolls of film exposed but undeveloped, 6500 rolls developed but not proofed, and 3000 rolls proofed but not examined (a total of a third of a million unedited exposures).
A street photographer takes a lot of photographs and as street photographer we don’t need to have fear to take a lot of photographs. The editing will make the rest and our personal story as photographers. With digital this is still easier.
I could make other examples, like the Japanese Daido Moriyama and Nobuyoshi Araki. The message is shoot, shoot and shoot.
Calle 5 de Febrero, Mexico City 2021
TECHNIQUE
The classic advice for street photographers consists of choosing a moderately wide-angle (28mm on a full-frame camera) lens to a camera, setting the ISO to a correct high speed depending by the camera and lens (I use 1600 on my Leica to simulate in digital the TRI-X film aesthetics), and pre-focusing the lens. Pre-focusing? Yeah, I mean Zone Focus.
Street photographers traditionally will set the lens at its hyperfocal distance but remember that this distance depends on the lens focal length and the aperture. With a fast film and a sunny day, I will probably be able to expose at f/16. With a 35mm lens focussed to, say, 2,5mt, subjects between 1.3mt and infinity will be acceptably sharp :"acceptable" means "if the person viewing the final photograph doesn't stick his eyes right up against it. f/16 was a way to go many times with my Leica in a sunny day due to the fact I need to use the camera as a snapshot camera, but I am aware to change the settings depending by the changes of the light conditions. Most of the times worked fine.
Guys, the best advice I can give you is that you need to know your camera and decide accordingly with that camera. The only certainty in photography is that there are no universal recipes. There are so many ways to get to results and many different ways of photographing that I have neither presumption nor any desire to give unique rules.
IMPORTANT: When I use a manual lens, for example the 7 Artisans 25mm f1.8 mounted on my Fujifilm XPro2, I have the hyperfocal distance scale marked on the lens ring and I can set in that way: if I am photographing subjects very distant from me I can go hiperfocal in order to have anything in focus. I will set the lens between f8 and f11. If I am photographing subjects close to me I set usually the distance scale to 5mt or less, for example 2mt if I am making in your face photos.
When I am using a Fujifilm lens, counting with AF, I still use manual focus for street photography, but the back button allows me to focus correctly the subject. Fujifilm X series cameras count with the focus peaking, a real-time focus mode that uses the camera's Live View focusing aid to highlight peak contrast areas with a color overlay in the LCD. I can choose the color of the the areas in focus, and I recommend the red high because is more visible than blue, for example. This is a great help to determine what part of the image is in focus before I shoot. With cameras where there is only a distance bar visible on the viewfinder or LCD, like in the case of older Fujifilm X series cameras, Leica X2 or Ricoh GRD, it can help to focus previously at a certain distance to know what part you will have in focus at the preferred distance: to focus my feet is always a generic useful tip for a street photographer.
When you start most of the pictures will be ruined due to poor focus, subject motion, bad composition, shutter lag. Don't feel bad at all: it is pretty normal. You will improve day by day.
