The street is a dangerous place to be in... or was it?

I have taken into liking the streets more and more... and like I always said, "One street, different stories." so yeah... it is pretty fun shooting in the streets. But how to get good shots? Well... there are a couple of ways...

1) Talk to your subject, ask for permission to take a photo of them. I did that sometime, but not a whole lot of time... because somehow, when I asked them if I could take a photo of them... and they agreed... they would start to pose. I find that unnatural... and the pic don't tell a story behind it.

2) Take candid shots. This is what I do most of the time with my 7D + 70-200mm f4L or 28mm f2.8 lens. I just shoot when I find something interesting. One method that I find very useful was to position my camera to aim in an entire area (close to a smaller aperture, and when someone walks into the frame 'click'!)

In this photo, I knew that there will be someone coming out from behind the door and so I purposely position my camera at that area, then waited patiently... immediately when someone came through, I shoot.

This photo too... I was using a wide angle lens (28mm) and position at one area, keeping a pretty small aperture so that the DOF is deeper. Then I shoot when someone walked into the frame like the two subjects.

You will find it pretty interesting that something these subjects even felt embaress that they have ruin your shots... but in actual fact... they have made your shot.

It is also one of the crucial techniques to take photos of subject that was in contrast or out of space with the rest of the background. For example, in a very modern society whereby we are seeing large number of machineries, but there is just this single subject that is different and very manual. Another example would be the photo on the right.
In this photo, I purposely took this shot to show the contrast between the main subject and the rest of the scene... whereby everyone was already using cars but we have someone on bicycle... And was in the wrong direction as compared to the vehicles.

It is also good to take a series of shots, as it will tell a good story behind those shot,



The above pics show of a boy sitting... he seemed pretty curious, then he notice me shooting at him and scrowl his face. It was pretty funny... and it is this type of pictures that actually tell the story. But in this case, the series had an ending and that ending was the boy not happy at someone shooting photos of him.

There are also the open ended story,

taking this pic for an example... it is a good photo with an open end story, it will give the audience space to think about the photo...

Questions like,

1) What is the old man taking photo of?
2) Why is he so well dressed?
3) What is behind those wrinkled face?
4) What is the story behind the old man, why is he so seemingly serious about the shots he is taking?

Well it is this type of questions that give the photo an open end story... and it make the photo better than the one featuring the kid.

This is another photo with an open end story... the person using her mobile phone to take photos... so it actually give the audience an open end story... and dimensions to think...

1) Who is the person, where was she from?
2) What was the photo she was taking? Was it a building, was it her friends?

In streets, your photos don't even had to be sharp, taking the woman for example, she was not really sharp, the focus was the story behind... or the lack of an ending.

In streets photography, there really is no need for your pic to be in full color. Many a times, black and white give similar or better impact.

This old man in black and white had a much bigger impact on the audience as compared to coloured photo. And like the above photos, it gave an open end story that encourage audience to think... to be more involved.

And you don't really need to have a complete picture whereby your subject is in full view... body... face... hair... whatever. Sometime part of the body is visible while other are not was also a good way to give the audience a pretty good dimensions for their imagination to run.

In the photo to the right... it didn't show the face of the old man... only his white hair.

It give audience a number of questions too...

1) Where is the old man heading alone, why he wanted to go there?
2) How he looked like
3) Where is he when this photo is taken.

and to some extend, 4) where is he now?

Well my point in street taking is that there are many stories behind the photos... and what make a good photo... of course not the beautiful girls and handsome jocks... but photos that tell a story... and to make the photo more appealing... it must have a story that is open ended, and with dimension or area for people to think and imagine.