I wanted to take a swing at shooting street photography. I often cruise the streets of Chicago for its’ architectural beauty but thought I’d change my focus to the city’s activity, its’ bustle and inhabitants.
So what is street photography? Wiki’s definition: Street photography is a type of documentary photography that features subjects in candid situations within public places such as streets, parks, beaches, malls, political conventions and other settings. If you cruise the web, you will find lot’s of definitions and personal philosophy of what street photography is “supposed” to be. Rather then get too hung up on it, I thought I’d give it a wack.
Before I shoot, I like to set out with a mind set or intent. This was my thinking. 1) No rules. 2) Try shooting from the hip and on the fly. 3) Try to capture a verb or action 4) Try to capture the environment 5) shoot a lot without expectation. 6) Capture things that stick out. Number 5 was probably the most liberating. It was fun to just shoot from the gut.
What about gear? There are lot of approaches to this. Shoot long and sneaky or shoot wide with max depth of field. I decided to go small and light and get up and personal but with a little flexibility. For me that is my Nikon D300 without the grip and a 18-105 kit lens to be shot at its’ sweet spot of f/8. Since I will be converting to black and white I didn’t worried when bumping up the ISO quite a bit.
If you take a look at the series here, I began shooting on my commute. There is a lot of decaying industrial buildings with tags all over the place. I was shooting through green glass of the train and there is some motion blur that looks pretty cool. You will notice a lot of images that have some lens flare as I was shooting directly into the sun. I couldn’t help but grab an architectural shot here and there. Chicago is a very cool city.
Here are some of my faves but check out the series.
Tip: Get your self up high to mix up the vantage point.
I like this because of the juxtaposition of a high performance Ducati Monster and the financial district business atire. You can see the building reflections in the guy helmet.
This was shot from the train. You can see a bit of motion blur which looks sort of cool. One thing to note is that the shutter release can be deafening on the morning train.
All post processing was done in Lightroom 3. I made my own pre-sets that get me in the ballpark and adjust to taste image by image.
What would I do to improve things for next time?
I would get the shutter speed up to reduce motion blur. While some of the shots looked cool with a bit of “movement”, I like my shots nice and sharp. Wide depth of field can’t cure camera shake.
I think I will continue with this approach for a little while. It was fun just to spot and shoot the city in motion. I have other ideas but I think this concept is worth exploring further.