“Over a year ago on June 15th I purchased a used camera and began a new path in photography. This was the day that I started trying street photography”. I started writing this post 2 years ago. I have now just passed my 3 year anniversary of shooting street photography. What I wrote still rings true today. The following is the original post with a few edits to keep it up to date.
Everyone is on the phone.
I was scared to shoot on the street, Like really scared. I was worried about people getting upset that I was making an image or even worse, that I could not find a scene and make a decent image. Mostly afraid that there would be conflict that I was taking a photograph. Armed with my newfound Fuji Xpro-1, I found that it was the perfect piece of equipment for this style of shooting. Understated and unassuming, helped with people not really paying attention to me. It was super quiet and people never really hear the shutter. With the viewfinder off to the side and being a right eye shooter, it’s hard for people to know where you are really looking. Nobody actually cared what I was doing. Just another tourist with a camera.
Portrait of a fire hydrant.
What I found was, I saw many scenes when I was wandering. After the first hour I realized there that I was enjoying it much more than I initially thought I would. Remembering back to all those street images that I saw in photography books and how much I liked them and the fear associated with what I thought the experience was really like. I was wrong. I get caught up in the moment searching for an image, deciphering the scene and capturing how I see it.
Outside lunchroom.
When I decided to try shooting street I was just filling in some photographic experience that I was missing. It was something that I thought most good photographers had to go through. I like shooting portraits but don’t have an abundance of models. When I look at images from shooters like Fan Ho or Saul Leiter I was always brought in by the scene or the lighting in the images. I felt that there was more to the image than the obvious subject matter. I wanted to be able to create images that were like these. I didn’t have the same cities that some of the famous shooters but I had a city anyways. Could I make similar images with what I had? I thought I could. After my first few outings I was completely hooked.
View from a parking garage.
Over a year later (three years later), I am still shooting street. I have based vacations off having some time to shoot in a new city. Like all photography, my style and ability keeps evolving. Seven thousand images later, I now choose to be more street shooter than anything else. I can see how some of these photographers chose to shoot what they shot. What I initially understood from the images that I saw was, that they were elevating a snap shot by separating a subject from everything else that was going on around them. There is so much more to a street photograph. The scene, interpretation, someone interacting with the scene and a little luck to catch a moment.
Walking into the dark side.
I go through the scenes that I have witnessed and try to create ideas and concepts that I want to capture. Like the shot that flows of the long exposure of the crosswalk. It shows the movement that a photograph doesn’t always capture. Mixing things I learned from long exposure landscape photography and applying it to a street scene. I can now start developing images based on what I see inside my head and taking control of the final outcome. I think there will be more in the future and once we can travel again, visiting new places to apply my style of photography too.
Pigeons in Seattle.