Are you a keen observer? Can you spot beautiful compositions in the most ordinary things while you travel or while you are walking outdoors through your own hometown? Well, this could be a sign for you to start practising street photography! Let’s learn more about how to master street photography.
What is street photography?
Street photography is the art of capturing any regular movement or scene within a city in a picturesque manner, usually in an outdoor setting. It is about photographing regular life events in an aesthetic way. Street photography does not necessarily mean taking photographs of a street, or even an urban area for that matter. It could be of any normal occurrence you might observe outdoors in regular city life.
An old shop, an old person, traditional activities. Any nook and location of a city can be photographed under street photography. While most street photos that you see online are candid images of random people, it is not always limited to that. Street photographs encompass any type of scene taken outdoors that depicts elements of regular city life.
TO LOVE THE STREET IS TO LOVE STREET PHOTOGRAPHY
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Ideas on street photography
As this topic covers a wide array of image types, here are a few ideas to inspire you and help you understand the type of scenes that would come under street photography.
Busy street photography scenes
Taking photographs of streets that are full of vehicles or pedestrians is a form of this outdoor genre of photography. As these images can change from place and place and season to season, one can always catch a different glimpse of busy streets in street photography.
Focusing on street elements
Photographing any particular element that you would find on the street such as bikes, animals, streetlights, roadside trees, shops, and even dustbins! Anything and everything, if composed well can be an effective subject.
Cityscapes
Capturing important attractions and the areas around cities can also be counted as street photography. You can also include pictures of the street during a local event or festival when the streets are lit up or are busy with yearly or monthly markets. Photographing handicrafts or other specialist local items in roadside shops is also considered a part of this type of photography. When photographing shop items ensure you ask permission of the business first.
Know your gear
As a basic step before starting with any kind of photography, make sure that you have the right kind of gear. Preferred lenses for street photography could range anywhere between 24 to 50 mm for cropped sensor cameras. Using cameras that are quick and with silent shutter is advantageous so that you can capture subjects in their natural setting without interference from the noise of the camera.
Conceptualize and create
Creating compositions can be difficult when capturing elements of street photography. However, adding in props can help convey your concept. Capturing images while you travel to different places is always a good idea as there will always be new experiences to document. However, ensure that not all your photographs are random.
Conceptualize and create a story around scenes where you would need to plan and execute accordingly. Ideas such as capturing a red-light district, an underground train station or an underprivileged area could be challenging yet important to showcase certain concepts.
Be vocal in street photography
Your photography need not necessarily have human subjects but when you do, you must talk to your subjects before the shoot and explain their role to them. This may be difficult in the beginning, but it will certainly lead you to better photographs and great outcomes from the photo shoot.
From the back!
Photographing from the backs of people can help you obtain equally aesthetic and natural scenes where you can easily eliminate all the camera shyness, both from your subjects and yourself! Look for people that could form a good silhouette in the night, of look for people with unusual styles of clothing and photograph them from different angles.
Through the glass eye
When at an airport or a restaurant, you can always use the elements around you to help create an overlooking point of view for the composition. Using glass doors or frames to photograph through can give a different perspective and depth to your images which would convey story.
Focus and out-focus
Playing with different camera settings can create an entirely different effect. The elements you include and exclude from focus can make for beautiful street images. Don’t forget to play with different settings to produce different effects. Try using aperture priority mode for street portraits and similarly using auto ISO will also help you to capture subtle colour variations more accurately, especially at night when there will usually be a multitude of different coloured lighting.
How to earn money from street photography
One of the most common ways to earn through any kind of photography is stock images. You prepare your images to a high quality and sell them on stock websites.
Street photography can also be used for documentation and editorial photography purposes or for creating pictorial and video documentaries on particular urban topics. Photography in these settings is usually sold to public magazines or newspapers that cover pertinent topics.
Creating your portfolio or publishing your images in the form of an exhibition or a book can also help you popularise your art and gain more clients for the future sales of your work. Always stay updated on upcoming art events and see whether you can join in with a group exhibit.
Once you master this genre of photography, you can always start photography workshops for others that may be interested in this genre.
Practice
It is easy to capture models and trained professionals but capturing everyday life and making it seem beautiful and aesthetic takes a lot of practice and will certainly put your patience and photography skills to test! If you are ready to go ahead and start your street photography journey, the streets await you!
Build a street photography portfolio
You can create a photography website portfolio of your street photography work. Save your greatest photographs and build a unique and eye-catching online portfolio through your social accounts such as TikTok, Facebook and Instagram.
Have fun in the rain with street photography!
Street photography captures unrehearsed moments.
