... your city, your town, or even your village. We don't all live in naturally photogenic places such as London, Paris, or New York, where great street photo opportunities fall at our feet, but we must never let this hold us back. In fact, it can be all too easy to overlook the potential of what we see every day of our lives and we shouldn't simply assume that "nothing interesting ever happens here:' ...
Rules abound in landscape photography and they are designed to help us create balanced compositions and achieve technical accuracy. Some of the better known include: the Rule of Thirds, which determines the placement of key compositional elements, such as the focal point and the horizon, by visualizing a grid of nine squares; the Golden Section....
From the earliest days, silhouettes have featured in street photography, either as a strong, graphic element in a wider shot, or a primary subject....
You will probably already be familiar with the White Balance (WB) button on your camera, but do you know what it actually does? For this assignment, you will learn its role and discover that it is a function you can also use creatively. ...
The challenge when photographing people on the street is making them look interesting. We've all seen boring street photographs of a guy crossing the street with his dog, or an old lady coming out of a shop with some bags. What's interesting about that? Usually nothing. So we need to work a bit harder...
As a landscape enthusiast there is an assumption that you should always use a tripod, and for most of the assignments in this book a tripod will either be helpful or essential. However, you don't always need a camera support and-on occasion-the speed and spontaneity of shooting handheld will be a more practical and creative choice. ...
An old adage of documentary and street photographers is "f/8 and be there," because for many of us it is a useful setting. The main reason is that it provides sufficient reasonable depth of field for us to zone focus effectively and include lots of context in the frame, both of which are important in street photography....
A correct exposure is really one that records a scene or subject in the way the photographer intended. Once you have fully mastered exposure, you can then manipulate it creatively. One way to do this is to use exposure to create a silhouette of your subject, by using an extreme form of "contre jour;' or "against the light" photography, with the subject strongly backlit and recorded as a black outline, devoid of color or detail....
You have one day, access to only one street and a single 24-exposure roll of film. What can you do with it? This assignment is designed to really make you think about every single frame you take so you build some "creative capital" into your shooting. If you can carry some of this philosophy through to the rest of your photography, you will have achieved something really worthwhile....