Monday, May 21, 2012

Street Photography

Until about a year ago I had never given much thought to doing street photography. But last year when I decided to do a blog that featured the city in which I lived it captured my interest. Recently I read James Maher's article "7 Secrets Every Aspiring Street Photographer Should Know" and decided to  put some of his tips into practice. Now I have shot from the hip using my Power Shot so I wasn't too worried about doing so with my Rebel T3, until I thought of the fact that now I was shooting on manual where before I shot on auto. It was rather fun but is definitely going to take much more practice. 
This first shot I was just a tad to slow or she was just too quick. As she passed me her face was toward me looking out to the street. But as you can see by the time I snapped the shot she had turned her head. Then I noticed the elderly gentleman coming towards me and as he neared I snapped again but as you can see it was very over exposed.

So I cropped the first shot with the woman to focus on the elderly gentleman in the background.
With the next two I got the subjects I was after and the exposure wasn't to far off but I did have to crop to achieve the frame I wanted.

All of the shots above, except the women at the Red Dog were over exposed and washed out to some degree and had to be edited. These next two shots I got exactly what I was going for with only a small amount of crop to the first image. Although the exposure is a tad dark, I decided I like them just the way they are so I did not do any editing.

My aim on this practice run was not so much on content, but more to focus on the following three things. To stop or slow down; To shoot from the hip and the big one to shoot in high ISO with a small aperture and fast shutter speed. The stop and slow down wasn't a problem. I even did a bit of a pause step in my walk without too much trouble. Shooting from the hip in manual was a bit harder than it is in auto and my aim was not as good as I had hoped it would be. I need to get better at switching the ISO while on the move. 
To see more shots of this historic area check out An Afternoon In Ghent. Do you enjoy street photography? If so do you have any tips?

1 comment:

Cynthia Schelzig said...

This was an interesting post...with interesting fotos....shooting from the hip sounds like fun:)