Master The Art of Cinematic Street Photography | Benjamin Dizdarevic | Skillshare
Search

Playback Speed


1.0x


  • 0.5x
  • 0.75x
  • 1x (Normal)
  • 1.25x
  • 1.5x
  • 1.75x
  • 2x

Master The Art of Cinematic Street Photography

teacher avatar Benjamin Dizdarevic, Filmmaker & Photographer

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Teaser

      1:33

    • 2.

      What To Pack

      7:35

    • 3.

      Night Settings

      5:59

    • 4.

      Location Research

      7:19

    • 5.

      Chasing The Light

      6:19

    • 6.

      Protect Your Gear

      4:44

    • 7.

      Become Fearless

      9:08

    • 8.

      Blending In

      5:42

    • 9.

      Capturing Authentic Moments

      5:42

    • 10.

      Two Ways of Photographing

      3:45

    • 11.

      All Choices Matter

      3:59

    • 12.

      Color Correction

      11:30

    • 13.

      Color Grading

      12:34

    • 14.

      Finding Inspiration

      6:25

    • 15.

      Hit The Streets

      1:28

  • --
  • Beginner level
  • Intermediate level
  • Advanced level
  • All levels

Community Generated

The level is determined by a majority opinion of students who have reviewed this class. The teacher's recommendation is shown until at least 5 student responses are collected.

257

Students

--

Projects

About This Class

Are you a hobbyist photographer who would like to learn a new kind of art? Then you've come to the right place. This course will teach you how to master the art of nighttime street photography. The course will teach you:

  • The art of street photography at night and its appeal. Shooting at dark versus shooting during daytime comes with some important key differences.

  • Cinematic editing in Lightroom (color correction and color grading in various styles).

  • Storytelling.

  • Capturing authentic moments on the streets for strong documentaristic photography.

  • Overcoming insecurities about going out and photographing people on the streets.

  • Composition and the various ways of capturing the streets.

  • The art of blending in and making yourself invisible, so that you can freely take photos of whatever you want without being confronted.

  • Location research and preparing your first session, so no session goes to waste and you are always prepared.

  • Packing as light as possible and using the correct gear for nighttime shoots.

  • Tweaking settings for noise reduction.

And much more.

By the end of this course, you will feel perfectly comfortable to go out, with a plan in mind, without any insecurities and be ready to shoot some cinematic street photos.

Hope to see you in the course as well as in our community!

Meet Your Teacher

Teacher Profile Image

Benjamin Dizdarevic

Filmmaker & Photographer

Teacher

Who Am I?

Hey there, my name is Ben and I'm a Bosnian-Swedish filmmaker and photographer, living and working in Stockholm. My passion has always been in the arts of the camera, whether it be photography or making movies. Besides that, I really really enjoy myself a good cup of coffee while I snuggle up and watch movies with my wife.

My Passions

This passion of mine, in the later years, extended into wanting to teach others how to create art using a camera and how to create a business out of their passion.

I'm glad you found your way over here to my page and I hope I'll be able to provide you with good value as you go on your journey!

Where To Find Me

I always enjoy connecting with like-minded people who are on a similar path with me. If... See full profile

Level: Intermediate

Class Ratings

Expectations Met?
    Exceeded!
  • 0%
  • Yes
  • 0%
  • Somewhat
  • 0%
  • Not really
  • 0%

Why Join Skillshare?

Take award-winning Skillshare Original Classes

Each class has short lessons, hands-on projects

Your membership supports Skillshare teachers

Learn From Anywhere

Take classes on the go with the Skillshare app. Stream or download to watch on the plane, the subway, or wherever you learn best.

Transcripts

1. Teaser: Street photography at night has a very special appeal to it. The dark and hazy atmosphere makes you feel as if you're living inside a cinematic masterpiece. And you might think that you need to be some kind of creative genius to achieve photos like that. But guess what? Everybody can learn how to do it. You just need the correct ingredients. My name is Benjamin, and I'm a photographer from Sweden. In this course, I will teach you what you need to know to properly embark on your new and exciting journey of nighttime street photography. I'll take you through the entire process from preparation to shooting to final result. This includes camera equipment and accessories, special settings that are specifically meant for nighttime street photography. Proper location research, and the concept of chasing the light so that your nighttime street photos can really stick out and be unique from the rest. I will also teach you some valuable mindsets to have in case you're feeling nervous or insecure about doing street photography. As well as the various light room editing techniques that I use to achieve that cinematic look in my photos. By the time you reach the final chapter of this course, you'll feel 100% ready to pull yourself up by the bootstraps, hit the streets and create some cinematic looking street photos. And the best part is you're going to achieve this completely on your own and with minimal gear. So if street photography at night is something that you've been wanting to master as of late, enroll in this course today and I'll take you through it. 2. What To Pack: Will my gear be enough? That's probably a question you're asking yourself because you might be thinking, I'm about to go out and shoot under very low light conditions. Will my gear matter? Yes and no. Okay. Because you might have some gear that has features built into it that are going to make the jobs so much easier for you. You want to be looking for gear that has basic things like auto focus, but as an added bonus facial recognition, you want to look for gear that has good low light capabilities, such as the Sony seven S series. And you want to look for gear that has very fast shutters, so you can make sure to really snap a whole bunch of photos as quickly as possible so that you can get that one money shot that you're looking for. Because in street photography, it's all about the passing moments and whether or not you managed to capture them at the same time. You don't really need the perfect gear, you don't need the most high end camera. The only difference is that if you have a camera that doesn't have all these features, you can still achieve the very same things. It means that you're just going to have to have better conditions to shoot in. You're going to have to plan more carefully. If you don't have facial recognition and you don't have fast, good auto focus, then it might take an extra moment of two for you to be able to achieve the same kind of photo as with somebody who simply points. The camera shoots 50 photos at a time and captures that one specific moment. And if you don't have good low light capability camera, then that means that you're going to have to adapt yourself more to the environment around you and more to the light so that you can get those low light photos to look good. So gear does matter and it also doesn't matter. It's just it's going to make the job harder or easier for you depending on the type of gear that you have and the type of functions and settings that that camera has. Another important factor in all of this are the types of lenses that you have. So think about it. If you want to go out and shoot and you have a lens that the lowest it goes to is like F seven, then you're going to have a pretty hard time shooting in low light situations, right? So you want to look for lenses that are fast lenses. And by fast lenses, what I mean is lenses that go at the very top, they should be at F 2.8 And anything below that is just a bonus you can get away with doing night time street photography with F 2.8 In fact, that's the lens that I'm using and I'm completely fine with that. But F 2.8 F 1.81 0.41 0.2 all of those are considered to be fast lenses. When you move from F four and up, then it's going to be more and more difficult for you to achieve the same kind of photos in low light situations. And what about focal length? Focal length is not really going to make the job harder or easier for you in low light situations, but it will make things harder or easier for you when you're actually photographing your subjects. If you're shooting with a lens that is 20 millimeters, that means you have to stand pretty damn close to your subject to get any kind of close up. And that will only increase the chances of you being kind of, you know, confronted, If you walk up to somebody like directly in their face, they might react to that. As opposed to if you have a focal length of 170 or 200, then you can stand like really far away without ever being discovered. So focal length matters as well, and especially if you're looking for the sort of cinematic photos that have really creamy sort of blurry backgrounds. The same thing applies there. You're going to need some lens that is at least 50 millimeter, 85 millimeter. These are some of the basic focal lengths that people use in street photography. 50, 85. Some people even go 35. But remember, just the lower your focal length, the closer you have to stand. That's in terms of camera gear itself, like the camera you're using and the types of lenses. How else can we achieve this sort of dreamy cinematic look in our photos, in our nighttime street photos? Well, with added accessories and filters, for instance, you can put on a filter on your lens that's called a pro mist or a black mist filter. And what this will do is it will create your highlights are going to be softened up. It's going to provide more of a hazy kind of look. It's going to look kind of foggy in the photos and that can make for some really cozy nighttime street photos. This is not an absolute necessity of course, but it will add a little bit extra to that atmosphere that you're looking for when you want to take cinematic shots. Another piece of gear that's going to make things easier for you is a strap on your camera. But specifically a rounded strap. And round straps are pretty good because when you have them, when you carry them around your neck, you're going to have an easier time making smooth maneuvers, okay? Because when this twists and turns, it doesn't really matter. You can't feel it. But with a flat sort of strap that you know, everybody else typically uses when you're doing sort of awkward maneuvers and you're trying to make them look smooth, that sort of flatness of the strap is going to like hit your neck. It's going to feel kind of uncomfortable and you're not going to have a good time. So I would recommend a rounded strap as opposed to the regular sort of flat straps to make things easier for you and to make things more comfortable for you. Final thing to bring up, which might sound obvious, but it isn't always, to be honest, is a tripod okay? Because when you use a tripod, the pros and cons of that is, the cons are you're going to have to stand pretty still in that one position. You can't really freely maneuver around and take photos as you please, but instead, you're standing pretty still to take that photo, you might be thinking, well, why would you even use a tripod? Well, depending on the darkness in the frame, depending on how much darkness there is, you might want to use a slower shutter to let more light in. If you don't have enough light compensation and other settings, then you're going to have to use a slower shutter to achieve that effect. And as you know, when you use a slower shutter, any kind of movement in the frame, including the movement and breathing of your hand, holding the camera is going to create motion blur. And the photo will look very shaky and it's going to look very bad. So you need to stand still in order to achieve that. Either you can shoot with a relatively slow shutter of say, one 20th, one tenth, and you could get away with standing still just with your arm or your hands holding the camera. But if you go any slower than that, you're not going to have a good time, right? You have to like stand perfectly still to take a photo that way. And that's when a tripod comes in handy. And this is pretty much all the gear that you need to be fully ready to go out and shoot nighttime street photography. 3. Night Settings: When it comes to noise reduction, right? You don't necessarily need a camera that has real, really good low light capability, okay? Because then you're going to be looking at some really expensive prices and that might not be something that you have. You could get away with doing some proper noise reduction by just being smart about the settings that you use and where you place yourself. But we're going to be talking about the settings specifically. So, obviously, when it comes to ISO, you want to keep the ISO as low as possible. The more you increase the ISO, the more noise you're going to be introducing. Think about the limits of your camera. First and foremost, understand how much ISO you can push on your particular camera before the noise becomes kind of unbearable. Because remember, a little bit of noise is not that much of a problem. You can probably push it more than you think, especially if you're using light room and you're using AI, noise reduction in post, which is very handy and very good at what it does. In that sense, you can pretty much get away with, you know, a much higher ISO number than you might think. I used to think that ISO on 12,800 or my camera was unusable. It wasn't good at all, My camera wasn't meant for that. It doesn't have, you know, dual ISO, dual native ISO or anything. But that's until I tried the new AI noise reduction feature and I realized that, yeah, I could get away even with 12,800 It's not preferable, but I can get away with it. So, look at your camera and do some low light tests to see naturally. How far can you push until the ISO levels are so high that you think the noise is unusable and take it down a notch. And just keep yourself at that level at most know your limits before shooting. If that means that for your camera it's 3,400 it's 6,400 it's whatever. Then you know at least that that's the limit, and keep yourself to that limit at all times. That's just to understand how you can approach ISO in your camera, But as you know, there's three ways of light intake in a camera besides ISO. We also have aperture and we have shutter speed. And what we want to do is we want to avoid using that ISO to the best of our abilities and use it only as a last resort. We want to look for the two other settings and see what we can do with them to really maximize that low light capability. Starting off with aperture, open up that aperture as wide as possible. That might be F 2.8 It might be F 1.8 as far as your lens allows for it. Because when you do that, you get two things, right? You get those sort of blurry backgrounds. That can be really cool when doing street photos. And that really enhance that sort of cinematic feel to it. And at the same time, it lets a ton of light in so that you don't have to sacrifice the ISO when looking to the aperture at firsthand. The second thing is the shutter speed you could get away. Let's say that you're using a shutter speed of one 60th or one 50th. You could drop it down to one 30th, one 20th, and I think even one tenth by just trying to stand as still as possible using your hands. And this is also when whether these rounded straps helps because you can sort of rest the weight of the camera and let your body sort of carry the camera mostly and just use your hands as like a little bit of a stabilizer to take those shots. But if that's not enough and you feel like you need to go any lower, then you're going to have a hard time doing handheld shooting. But think about it, If you have one 20th of a second with an F 2.8 lens, you can get away with pretty low ISO in most situations. And finally, when you expose for a shot, always make sure to expose for the highlights, because when you have overblown highlights, when you're overexposing the highlights, you will lose all of that information and it's going to be much, much harder to bring that back in post. So as you're shooting at night, make sure that your high lights are not overexposed and allows or allow your shadows to be dark, to be almost crushed. Because you will be able and you're going to have a much easier time bringing all of that back in post. And this is, and it's very important if you're shooting using raw, which in my opinion, you should always do because why not? You have all of that information. You never know when you're going to go back in a few years and revisit certain photos. And when you do, you want to make sure that they are in raw in case you want to make some changes in photos that you thought back then you didn't need to edit at all. But maybe you will need in the future. I always save things up and I would recommend you do it as well. Shoot raw all the time, then you can have an easier time bringing those shadows up, really pushing it to the limit so that you can even out the crushed shadows with the evenly lit highlights. So expose for the highlights, together with all these settings, together with all these accessories, together with all this gear, and you're going to have a good time shooting nighttime street photography. And before we move on, just an important, if you're liking the information so far, please make sure to leave a rating and review because this will really help the algorithm in pushing out this course to more people. Now let's move on to the preparation and planning process of nighttime street photography, and in this case, specifically, location research. 4. Location Research: Now, don't get this wrong, You can totally get away with doing street photography without any planning, without any preparation, and just going out and shooting spontaneously. Question is just how prepared you want to be so that you can be as effective as possible. And by effective, what I mean is increase your chances of getting some photos that day. And you will increase the chances depending on how much preparation you do. I'm specifically talking about location research, mapping things out, and outlining your shot. Before doing it, this is just so you can avoid any unwanted surprises when you show up. So let's talk about it. First of all, finding a location is not just good for the aesthetics of the shot, like finding a pretty location. But finding and preparing for a location also has to do with the lighting conditions. For you to show up and know exactly what's waiting for you on that other side. Because some streets might look amazing during daytime, but during night time they look horrendous. And by horrendous, I mean they don't have enough light, they just look bad and you're not going to have a good time shooting under those conditions. So you don't want to show up to a place and kind of look at it and go, well, now I feel screwed right? This was not what I expected at all. It looked good at 12:00 P.M. but not now. So this is why we do preparations a lot of the times. But of course, you can also just go out and shoot randomly by, you know, making it a habit to bring your camera with you everywhere you go, then whatever, be spontaneous. When it comes to researching a location, there's two ways you can do it. Either by walking to that location or by doing research online. When walking around, do it beforehand. So before you're planning to actually shoot, just consider it to be like a sort of research walk that you're doing. Walk to the streets that you're interested in, and create an album on your phone called, you know, nighttime locations or whatever you feel like. And for every location you go to and take that photo, save it to that album and write some notes. Write down specifically notes on how populated are the streets, what are the lighting conditions, and how long does it take? You go from point A to point B, because what you might want to avoid is finding one good location, and then you go there, you finally get there and you might get a shot or two, maybe nothing. And then there's nowhere else to go, because the closest good location from there is far, far away. So map your entire sort of walk beforehand. Mark all the locations on the map and see if you can connect them somehow so that you can see. Okay, if I take a one or two hour long street photography session walk, I can cover these 56 different locations. They're all sort of in the area. That will be the ideal way of doing it. Because remember, we want to increase our chances of getting some good photos. And this is the way to do it, this is the way how to prepare for it, and this is the way how to sort of map out the entire walk so that you have more and more people. Good light conditions, good gear, good equipment, good accessories. All to increase the chances of getting some good photos. What's good about modern phone is that it's always going to have some sort of geotag metadata like built into it. So whenever you open up that photo in your album, even three years from now, you're going to see the name of the street, the exact location, so you can always find your way back. This was in terms of researching by foot, by just going there, finding locations and writing them down. What you could also do is just find these locations online, do some research. This could be either your hometown or maybe it's a different country or different city that you're going to look it up beforehand and see what other people have done. A really effective way of doing this is by going on Instagram and looking at location tags. So simply write down the location, the city, the street, whatever on Instagram and look at the photos that people have taken using that same tag. Then you can find those streets and see how other people have taken street photos or architecture photos in that location. What you then do, and this is what I do, is I create collections on Instagram. And whenever I see a post that I like that's relevant to the type of photography I want to do. So in this case, nighttime street photography. I will simply hit Save Two collection and put it in that folder. That way I can either categorize by photography type like nighttime street photography or portrait photography, or by location, city, country, whatever. And you just have all of these in your collection. And then you do the same thing as with the previous one. You just open up maps and you start tracking all these locations. Look up where is that location and how long does it take for me to get there and to get from there to the next one, and next one and next one. And keep that map with you at all times. Some of the things that you want to look for in cinematic street photos are things like fog and rain. Rain can really account for some really cool reflections, especially if you're shooting window reflections. Or if you're shooting puddles on the street. It can account for some really cool shots. So look for things like rain, or snow, or fog. Anything that adds to the type of cinematic feel that you want. That adds to the sort of haziness, the kind of ambience that you're looking for to make it look as much as a movie as possible. But of course, don't overthink this, because in the end, street photography is about the subject that you're framing in the shot and hitting that shutter button. That's what's going to matter the most. And in order to achieve that, you have to, at the very least, have good enough lighting conditions to make that photo look the way you want it to look or to properly light up the subject that you're trying to photograph. And how do you do that? What is the concept of chasing the light to really achieve and maximize the quality of the street photos you're taking? Let's talk about that next. As a first easy assignment, what I want you to do is do exactly what I do. Open up Instagram and create various collections of the types of categories that you want in your street photos. This could be a general category, like nighttime street photography. It could be a location based, so the name of the city or street that you want to go to and start filling it up by using the geotags on Instagram. Look at photos that people have taken. They don't have to be nighttime street photos, they just have to be photos of the locations you're interested in visiting and save them to the appropriate collection. And then finally, map out your very first street photography journey using Google Maps or Apple Maps. 5. Chasing The Light: Before we get into the concept of chasing the light, we have to first understand why we're doing it, why are we chasing the light? Because if you think about taking dark night time street photos, your logic might tell you, well, you're looking for dark corners, you're looking for dark streets, you're looking for dark areas because you want to get dark photos. But think about it. If you take photos in the dark, in the actual dark, you're only going to get a dark photo. That's not the same as nighttime street photography. You're just going to get an unusable photo. So what we need to do is look for light sources to motivate that darkness. So we're telling the story of darkness by adding light, which sounds counterintuitive, but think about it in a different way. Let's say you're watching a movie and the movie represents a scene that's supposed to be pretty silent. Like imagine a horror movie or something and somebody sitting in the living room. And they're supposed to represent silence. How did they do that? Same way if that scene had, you know, no audio at all. Because that's how you would achieve silence, right? You just click the mute button on the microphone and you have no audio. That's going to do is you would just look at a scene that looks like a silent film. You're just going to get a mute scene, which is not the same as silence. So what do they do in movies? Well, in the instance of this, somebody sitting on the couch, it's a horror movie and they want to represent that silence. They will add sound. You might add a sound of water drops, like in the water tap in the bathroom. You just hear a little bit of drops. Or another way to represent this is if somebody is walking down the hallway and you just hear the echoes of the shoes in the hallway. So you see how that works. You're adding sound to represent silence in the similar way we have when we take photos and we want to do dark cinematic photos, we're doing it by adding light, not removing it. So we do need light to take photos, and this is where the concept of chasing the light comes in. You have to have light in order to represent darkness. Otherwise, we just have an unusable photo. That's your primary motivator in going out and shooting at night. Where is the light? You got to chase the light. The best way to do this, especially if you're a beginner and you've never tried nighttime street photography, is to go to a place that does have a lot of light. This is typically the center of the city. The night is the night that we see in the sky at the time of day. But the light source, they're going to be all around in the city. Go into the city where there's a lot of people, there's a lot of light, and take it from there. Because you might be thinking, well, I don't want photos of a lot of people in the shot. But by being in the city and with having access to all that light, you can then pick and choose. You can either wait for a particular area to be less populated or go there when it's less populated or within the city, you can look for corners of streets with only a few light sources. But it's always good to have that big backup where even if that one street never has a person walking by and the lighting conditions are kind of me, then you always just turn the camera around and you always have the choice of having the big city lights just behind you or to the side of you, besides just looking for the places which have big light sources that sort of properly lit up all the subjects. You can also look for so called ambiental lighting. And this doesn't have to mean a big city with lots of lights. Instead it can mean the small light sources within that street that will help you achieve the same effect. This can be anything from neon signs on the street. It could be car head lights. It can be one or two street lamps that are either lighting up the subject directly, or you photograph the subject using certain reflections, you can get some really cool effects. Like I mentioned earlier, if it's raining and you can get some really cool effects with the light and rain, in combination, shining onto a window or by using puddles on the street. This is a bit of a cliche, but people still do it. Puddles on the street where you can photograph somebody through a reflection. That's what rain is going to do to you, and that's what all these ambiental light sources are going to do for you as well. Because the entire background could be darker. And we can allow it to be darker as long as the front or the main part of your photo is lit up in some way. And this is either by using big street lights or city lights, or the ambiental lights of cars, neon signs, or one or two street lamps on the street or anything else that you find on the way. But this is not to misunderstand that your subject has to be lit up. They don't have to be lit up whatsoever. Do not fear darkness and shadows because with darkness and shadows, you get a lot of contrast. And with a lot of contrast, you can create for some really cool effects. You can, for instance, not have the subject be lit up. You can have the background lit up, but not the subject. And in that way, create a silhouette. And a silhouette is always a cool effect to have if you want to add a little bit of mystique to the story that you're telling at night. The subject is not, doesn't necessarily have to be let up. As long as there's some light source in the frame and you know how you're going to use it, subject to be in the dark or in the light. The background could be in the dark or in the light, but we need some light source to motivate that darkness. That is how you understand the concept of chasing the light. 6. Protect Your Gear: I mentioned earlier how rain and fog and even snow can make for some really cool additions to the ambience of the shot you're taking. But that begs the natural question of, will that not destroy my equipment. To be honest, you might have some really good equipment that has some kind of protection to harsher weather conditions. However, even that has its limits. A few raindrops here and there, a lot of cameras can handle that. But if we're talking about proper rainfall, like pouring of rain, blizzards, you know, a lot of snow, not a lot of cameras can really handle that. If you're not quite sure if your gear can handle that, then you need to be able to protect it somehow. Of course, it depends on how much rain there is and how much snow there is, but it's always good to keep it safe. Keeping your gear protected is very important and here's some of the ways that you can do that. Either you can find protection within the street where you are actually shooting, so you can be standing under a roof, or you can be standing somewhere where that rain or snow fall cannot really reach your equipment and you shoot from there. That way you're going to be safe 100% of the times. However, it does limit you, it means that you're going to have to standing still under those particular spots, under those particular rooftops in order to get the shots. And maybe you want to move around a little, maybe you want to be free to move wherever you want to go and take photos on the fly. What do you do in that case? That's when rain protection comes in. And you can either buy like protective gear for the camera or you can create some at home. The best way that I found that you can do this is simply by using a plastic bag. A plastic bag that you cut out a hole in, in the very front where your camera lens will stick out from. But the point is that the rest of the camera is protected from that rainfall. Cover your camera with the plastic, but leave a hole in the very front so the lens can properly see the shot as it is. You don't cover it with plastic because then you're just going to ruin the image. It's not going to look good. So you have to cut out a hole and protect the rest of the camera, but leave the lens free. This way you get both of the best worlds you can walk around freely. You will be protected and you don't have to worry about your gear getting damaged or destroyed in the process of taking night time street photos. A third way you can do this if you don't want to sit at home and like cut up plastic bags and use it that way is that you can simply bring an umbrella and you can definitely maneuver around by holding an umbrella at the same time. One way to do this is to place the umbrella right here. Hold it like this, and you have the umbrella above you. And then you can take photos using that method. Or if that feels uncomfortable and you can't really maneuver around properly, what else you can do is you can get a small umbrella. And by using a combination of a small umbrella in one hand, the rounded strap with your camera around your neck, then you can get away with actually holding the small umbrella up and lifting up your camera with the other hand. Or the opposite, depending on where your shutter button is and photograph that way. Those are the three ways to avoid damaging your gear under harsh weather conditions. Either stand under rooftops and photograph that way. Bring a plastic bag that you cover your camera with or bring an umbrella. The point is just you have to play it safe because you never know when the weather conditions are going to change. This is not just to protect your camera gear, but also to protect the time that you've invested in going out and shooting. Imagine if you're driving somewhere, it seems like the weather conditions are fine, but you are unprepared. You haven't checked the weather report. You show up, you take maybe a total of two photos and all of a sudden rainfall. What are you going to do? Just call it a night. That's why it's good to always bring one of these things with you or prepare somehow for rain all the time. Be prepared beforehand before the harsh weather conditions kick in. So bring that with you. Have it in your bag. And if you need to pull it out, pull it out. And if you're happy with just standing under a roof, do that. But whatever you do, protect your gear, it's worth going the extra mile. 7. Become Fearless: Walking on the street with a camera at night and snapping photos of people, random people on the street can be pretty daunting or scary, to say the least. I know I was terrified at the thought of doing that. I spent so much time avoiding wasting so much time avoiding going out on the streets, photographing people. You feel creepy, you feel like you're invading people's privacy, you feel awkward, and you're afraid that at least I was, that somebody might confront me. And they might kind of go, what the hell are you doing? Why are you taking photos of me? And that fear. If you have that fear and you have those insecurities, trust me is completely normal and you should have them right. Because it just means you're probably a pretty decent person because you worry about like a, am I bothering people, am I doing something I'm not supposed to do? So it's good that those signals are being sent to your brain and kind of warning you socially about doing something like this. But on the flip side, what it also does is it actually limits you. It prevents you and might halt the amount of time that you have like to gather courage to go out and shoot. And might prevent you from doing it at all. So in that sense, it's bad to have those insecurities. And we want to minimize them as much as possible, and we want to prevent them from kicking in when it's actually time to go out and shoot. And how do we do that? How do we overcome these insecurities? So I'm going to give you a rundown of all the tips that I have of things that I did to overcome these fears and finally feel comfortable in going out and doing street photography. So when I first started out, I started thinking, well, what I need to do first and foremost, is I need to be comfortable going out with a camera on the streets. How do I become comfortable doing that? Because me myself, I'm not okay or comfortable with just going out and doing it on my own. But what if I brought somebody with me? So what I did as a very first step is that I either brought a friend, a photographer friend, or my wife to come with me out on the streets to do that. What this does is it removes sort of the burden that you have placed on yourself in doing street photography and then being in an awkward sort of social situation. It removes that burden or at least has it. So it's 50% on you and it's 50% on the friend that you're bringing, especially if it's a photographer friend doing the same thing you're doing. Because in that case you feel united and you feel less awkward doing it because you're having a conversation with your friend at the same time as you're doing it. And in the absolute worst case scenario, right, if somebody comes up to you and confronts both of you about photographing them or somebody else on the street, at least there's two versus one, right? You will feel more comfortable and you can kind of go, well, I'm just walking around with a friend, we're taking some photos, and it's going to appear way less creepy. As opposed to if you walked alone and you got confronted, then that is a heavier load on your shoulders because then you're the only person standing in a dark corner somewhere pointing a camera at someone. And that was the part that I was afraid of. So for me, step number one was to simply make myself comfortable by bringing a friend with me on my first street photography journey. The second thing I did, and this is more of a mentality shift, is that I started seeing things from a certain perspective when I walk on the street, anywhere, any city, anywhere in the world. When I walk on the street I see people carrying cameras with them all the time. And a lot of the times I've noticed them filming or photographing, you know, the scenery, people around them capturing kind of just sort of everything. And never once have I felt uncomfortable. And never once have I felt like, what the hell is that person doing? I'm going to walk up to them and I'm going to tell them what's what, you know, what I mean? So like a lot of the times people either don't even notice you and if they do, they kind of just go, oh, it's a tourist, like taking photos, whatever. And this will bring us to the next point in the next module, which is going to be about blending in and seeming like you're just a stupid tourist, right? You're just there and you're photographing everything. You want to make sure to not single somebody out, too obviously. But yeah, what I'm trying to say, it's more of that mentality sort of approach. People don't really care as much as you think they do. And there's even less of a chance that even if somebody notices and even if it kind of bothers them or makes them uncomfortable, they're not even going to walk up to you and actually confront you. You're going to have to be extremely unlucky to have that happen to you. And I can speak to that from just based on my own personal experience. I've been to multiple countries, multiple, many streets, taken thousands and thousands of photos. Sometimes I've seen in the shot that I'm taking that somebody's looking directly into my camera and they kind of even give me the side eye, you know. But never once in all my journeys, all my photography sessions have I had somebody walk up to me and confront me and tell me that I shouldn't do that or to delete the photo never happened. So this is something that really comforted me as I was starting to create this sort of mentality shift in me is that I thought people most probably don't care, Let's go out and test it with a friend. And then I did never got confronted and it was fine. Then I did it again and again. Then I switched, I went to Japan and took photos there. Nobody cares really. So it's not actually going to happen to you. But if you do feel uncomfortable, like I said, bring a friend for the first few times until you really see that it's not a big deal. And then you can start going out on your own. And if all else fails, think about it. You don't really have to do candid photography in order for it to count as street photography. If you're seeing an interesting shop keeper and you know that they're probably going to see you 'cause you're the only one kind of standing there and you want to take photos. It doesn't have to be candid photos. You don't have to make it uncomfortable. Simply walk up to that shopkeeper and kind of go, hey, I'm walking around taking some photos of the city and I thought your shop looked really interesting. Could I stand back a few feet and just like snap some photos of you working? Is that cool? I could even give you the photo like afterwards if you want to take a look at it. If you want to keep it or use it for social media or whatever, most of the time people are going to welcome that and they're going to be like hell. Yeah. And they might even show off a little in front of the camera, but let them do their thing, take some photos and doesn't have to be candid. Right. You could just walk up and ask somebody for permission to take their photo. If you really feel the tension is strong and you feel uncomfortable in that particular situation, taking some candid photos of that person, ask them. It's not a big deal. But if that's not you and if that triggers your social anxiety even more, then the only thing we have left is the thing that we're going to talk about next, which is blending in, making yourself a ninja. So that you never, ever attract attention to yourself. And you can always stay hidden while taking your street photos comfortably. So let's hop into the next chapter and talk about blending in. So to really internalize what we've talked about here in terms of mentalities and overcoming this fear of going out, I think it's very important to do what I did before actually planning your first shoot. So as a second assignment, what I would like you to do is, based on the research that you've done from the first assignment, find one street, one location and go to that location either completely by yourself or bring a friend. Go there and make yourself comfortable with bringing out the camera with you and take photos of the streets. Now, for this second assignment, you don't ever actually have to include any people in the frame. It's not that important to start with. This is just to make you comfortable going out with a camera and having people see you, take photos. And if you want to include a person in the frame and you feel brave enough, then certainly take photos of people on the street. But it's not a necessity for this assignment. And if you want to fake it, then you can have that friend of yours walk in the frame and take a photo of them instead instead of a stranger. So take photos of the street based on the locations that you found from the first assignment. And make yourself comfortable simply taking photos on the street with a person or without a person. And when you do, make sure to post this in the Facebook group so we can take a look at together what you've achieved. 8. Blending In: Blending in is extremely important for street photography, especially at night. Because you want to avoid attracting as much attention as possible so that you can avoid the risk of somebody confronting you. And you want to increase your chances of getting those spontaneous moments that you're going to have a harder time getting if people constantly notice that you're carrying a camera and photographing them. And even if confrontation, like I mentioned earlier, is really not a big deal, it's still a distraction and a waste of time for what you're there to do, street photography. You don't want to spend a lot of time just talking to people and telling them it's not a big deal, I'm just taking photos and like you don't want to end up in uncomfortable situations for no reason. So if you can avoid it, do it. And these are some of the ways that you can blend in so that you can really take on that ninja role. And like I mentioned earlier, the sort of stupid tourist role. First of all, this goes back to the very first point that we made, which is packing light. This actually helps more than you think, because think about it. If you're standing on the street with a huge camera and a three to 500 millimeter lens that's used for like nature photography. And you're pointing that like on people on the street. You're going to get noticed. Like you're going to attract a lot of attention. You're just going to look like a buffalo and a chicken farm. So you want to avoid that. First and foremost, you want to pack as light as possible. One lens that you're choosing for that particular purpose, a small camera strap around you and walk around and just simply shoot everything. This brings us to the next point which is don't just hone yourself in on finding one person that you want to photograph and stand still and just wait for that person to do something. The longer you stand still pointing the camera at one person, the higher the chance that that person is eventually going to turn around and kind of go. Are you pointing that at me? So don't do that. What you have to do instead is be constantly on the move. And by on the move, what I mean is you don't have to constantly, like, walk around. But at least make sure that you're moving your camera around as much as possible so you can point at a building, you notice somebody in the corner of your eye. And you don't really do this, like you don't really turn around as quickly as possible to photograph them. But you're sort of moving the camera down, down the street, down the walls, all the other people walking around, until you sort of reached the point where you're pointing the camera at that person. Snap a few photos and then back off and continue photographing. So you have to be kind of dynamic in the process at the same time as you're also physically moving around. But when you find a spot, a particular spot where you want to take a photo, then just do that, do the stupid tourist approach. Kind of look around, look like you're in awe. And just lead the camera sort of like a paint brush all throughout that scenery. And then snap photos on the way as you go. And what can really, really make this work tremendously well is if your camera has a silent shutter, some cameras and look up your model, some cameras actually allow you a setting or a function within the camera to turn off the electronic shutter so that when you take a photo, it makes no sound. It doesn't do the whole, you know, sound as you're taking the photo. It's completely silent. And if you happen to have that, then even better, then you can stand even closer to people and the sound will not attract any attention either. So that in combination with moving around with the camera, will make you just sort of look like you're there photographing absolutely everything. No one person is going to feel singled out, and that's one of the key things in blending in when doing street photography. This is when a flip screen would be really useful. Because what you can do, what you want to do is you want to avoid bringing up the camera to your face and photographing. Because every time you make that movement, you're being noticed by people around you and they're going to sort of look at what it is that you're photographing. Because when you do this, then you know exactly in which direction the camera is pointing. And people standing on the side or in front of you are going to feel singled out. So if you have a flip screen, you can photograph either by not looking at all and so called, you know, shooting from the hip or you can flip out that screen, keep it sort of here, and as you're framing the photo, you can look around and snap those photos without anybody noticing, right? Or at the very least, they might think that you're walking around and you're shooting video because if you have a silent shutter, they have no idea that you're taking photos. And they might think you're just sort of shooting video. And that helps because that means it's not a frame, one frame of one person being singled out. Instead, it's just a video of the city. You're a tourist, you're walking around, and it's going to look as natural as possible. Look toward your gear and see what you can implement in street photography, how we can help you. Does it have a silent shutter? Does it have a flip screen? All of that stuff matters. Look to your camera and see what's possible, and use it to your advantage. By doing all these things in combination, we can achieve what the next part of this process is, capturing authentic moments. Let's talk about that next. 9. Capturing Authentic Moments: In order to capture authentic moments, we're tying it back to what we talked about previously, which is blending in once you have managed to blend in properly and using all the precautions that we talked about, now is the time to really capture those intricate little moments without being noticed. How do you do that? What you want to look for first and foremost, are either interesting or interesting actions. With actions come emotions. These are the three things, the three pillars of making a good street photo. Just keep in mind that it's not going to be easy, right? People are typically on their way somewhere when they're on the street, Right. Rarely ever do people just stand still unless they're out on a smoke break or on the phone or whatever. But a lot of the times people are on the move, so you're not going to have a lot of time snapping the photo that you want. You're going to have very little time and it's going to require you to know the settings in and out and be prepared for all kinds of situations. So when it comes to these three pillars, first of all, interesting clothing with interesting clothing pretty much don't need any of the other aspects because the shot itself is going to be aesthetically interesting. It could just be a shot of somebody walking or biking, or driving their car, or sitting on the street doing nothing. But if they have interesting clothes, that makes for an interesting photo in and of itself. And interesting clothing is not something you can really plan for, it's just something that pops up in your frame. But the good thing about that is that if somebody is wearing interesting clothing, you will always notice it because they're going to stick out from the crowd. So look for that in places where you can. And if not, look for actions. Actions are going to be the next thing. And actions are anything that a person is doing as they're on the street. Sure, walking is an action, but it's kind of a boring action. Somebody biking is an action, but it could be a boring action. Other actions could be somebody doing their job. It could be somebody, a construction worker on the street. It could be somebody working in a restaurant. It can be somebody face timing their friend on the bus. It can be any kind of action that you see that delivers a story in the photo, it could be a father holding the hand of his little daughter walking to the park. Anything but with actions, a lot of the times you might get that extra added bonus which is some kind of emotion. So let's say you photograph somebody face timing their friend. But you can see that the friend, like on the phone, on the screen you can see that the friend is crying and the person face timing them looks very concerned. All of a sudden you've created a story there as well. Now remember, just because the emotions displayed in front of you are mean one thing as you hear them and see them, it doesn't have to mean that those emotions translate the same way to an audience. So somebody could be crying and you're taking a photo of that. And everybody looking at that photo or kind of thinking, look how sad that person is. But in reality, as you took the photo, that person was crying because they were laughing so much it could be something completely different, right? So emotions don't necessarily translate. So if you look for a particular emotion that you're really interested in, you don't have to find that exact emotion. You can find something that represents that emotion. And in this way you're creating your own story and your own interpretation. And the audience looking at that are going to interpret it in their own way as well. So if you manage to find, and this is when you really hit jackpot. If you manage to find an interesting composition with a person doing an interesting action with interesting clothing, with a strong emotion, then you've really hit the gold line, right then you've got a fantastic photo most times, but that's going to be extremely rare. And every few thousand photos you take, you're going to have one or two that really stick out that make you go, wow, this really hits all the criteria that you can imagine for like a fantastic photo. It doesn't always happen, but that's why it's good to know all these sort of things individually, so you kind of know what you're looking for. So you don't end up in a situation where you simply walk on the street and you hope for something to happen. Because what is that something? You got to know what that something is, You got to know what you're looking for. Some of the times you are going to end up in just a spontaneous situation and you look at somebody and you go, well, that looks interesting and you take the photo. But it's good to know what you're looking for, because then you can have sort of a sharper eye in the process of walking. Because walking for one or 2 hours for each session is quite a lot of time and you can get all hazy in the head and whatever and not really know what you're looking for. You can get bored. But if you have an agenda, if you have a plan, then at least you know what kind of things approximately you're looking for. And that's going to help you in the process of capturing all these authentic moments. Now, before we move on, please make sure if you haven't already, to leave a rating and review of this course if you like it so far. Now the next thing we're going to be talking about is what to prioritize during your shoot. There's a lot of things happening on the street at the same time. What should you prioritize and how should you approach street photography? 10. Two Ways of Photographing: There's generally two ways that you can approach street photography. Either by having something come to you and happen spontaneously, or for you to compose first and shoot later. What are the pros and cons of both of these methods? And which should you use starting off with? Which should you use? We both of them. It depends on what happens during your walk. Don't be closed off to any of these things. Just be open to any kind of possibility, right? And use it to your advantage. So in the first instance, you might just be photographing spontaneously. You're just walking on the street. You're waiting for something interesting to happen. And might happen, might not happen. That's sort of the con of it. It could happen, but also you could just walk around and all you can really see is just people walking and nothing interesting is going on. That's a bit of a con of that whole thing, but at the same time, the good thing about that is that if it does happen and you get this like magical moment spontaneously, then you're going to feel that sort of authenticity in that photo. You're going to feel that it's very spontaneous and that could really make for a good photo, because you might not get the perfect settings, right? If you're spontaneously quickly shooting something, you might not get the perfect settings. You might, your shutter might be too slow and there's some motion blur. There's a bit of a camera shake. There's something you can see that the photo is taken sort of in a dirty way. But that, believe it or not, adds to the authenticity that could make for a really interesting photo because it's not overly planned, it's not like overly perfect. The second way you can do this in approaching street photography is by composing. First, it means that you walk on the street and you don't even think about people. For starters, you look at interesting things, architecture, background textures, and you find something interesting. And you go, this is a good photo for me, like an aesthetically beautiful photo without a single person having to be in the frame. And then you set up your camera and you frame that composition, and it looks fantastic. And then what you do is you wait. What this does is that you will end up in a situation where even if nobody walks by, nobody is interesting, nothing has happened. You're still going to end up with a Pre photo because you've composed first for an aesthetically beautiful photo. And then whether or not somebody walks in, it's kind of irrelevant. But of course, if they do and they're interesting, then you're going to get a fantastic photo. So either you can do this handheld or you can do this by mounting it on a tripod. But you have those two ways of just spontaneously taking photos, which may or may not turn out good. Or you compose first and you wait, you play a waiting game. So those are the two ways that you can approach, you know, street photography in general. But it does require you to keep an active mind, constantly look for all the things that we talked about earlier, interesting subjects. And interesting subjects doesn't just have to be people, it can also be buildings. It can also be backgrounds and textures. Find something that is interesting within the frame, compose for that, and take the photo, or walk around and spontaneously take photos. The point is just use both of these methods. Don't go out there with just one plan and only stick to that plan. Things on the streets are happening constantly at a fast pace and you got to be ready for that. 11. All Choices Matter: Everything matters, whether it be on during street photography or any other kind of photography, any kind of art. Your intentions will matter. Every choice that you make will matter. Because it will directly reflect on the end result of that photo. And it will directly have an, a subjective impact on the audience looking at that photo. When I say everything matters, what do I mean? I'm talking specifically about all the sort of choices that you make in taking a particular photo. This could be everything from the gear you're using, the settings you're using, to the more abstract things that you don't really have direct control over, such as weather conditions, such as season, such as clothing and color, and all the details in the frame. They're going to affect the photo differently based on the choices that you make in the very end, how you graded and how you color corrected. That's also going to matter, and we're going to talk about that more when I start editing the photos cinematically in light room. And I'm going to take you through the entire process of doing that. To put this in perspective, think about if you're taking a photo, say during wintertime as opposed to summertime. You want to take some landscape photos or some forest photos. You go out in the forest and it's wintertime, all the trees are naked. You snap that photo and then you go back during summertime and you have birds and animals and green trees, and they're all fluffy and big and looks like real nature. You take the exact same photo with the exact same settings, from the exact same position, and you show that photo to an audience. They're going to react very, very differently to both of those photos. In one instance, during wintertime, somebody might experience that and kind of go, this looks like a horror movie. Then they look at the summer photo and they go, I feel all warm and tingly inside. Right? And that's just based on the choice that you made in one criteria which is season. Now, apply all of this to everything in photography. It will matter not just the season but also the time of day. If you're doing nighttime street photography, you're going to get widely different shots if you do it on a Tuesday at 05:00 P.M. when the sun is just set and everybody's on their way back from work and you get all these like tired people going home or preparing and go to a restaurant and they're all formally dressed. As opposed to if you do the very same nighttime street photography, but you do it at 11:00 P.M. on a Friday night. And then you're going to get a wildly different atmosphere out in the city. So all the choices you make will matter. So think about the type of photo that you want to take and the type of subjects that you're looking for in your street photography. In the beginning, you don't have to have a clear idea of this. You can just go out whenever and shoot whatever. That's just an experimental phase for you because you want to just sort of learn and feel comfortable in doing street photography to begin with. But later on maybe you want to hone yourself in on particular subjects, particular themes. And then you have to think about the choices that you make and how they are going to affect that particular type of photo. You want to take it. Snowy. Is it rainy? It 05:00 P.M. 11:00 P.M. What kind of colors are being shown? How am I going to grade this? Never underestimate the choices that you make. Because somebody looking at that photo and you looking at it or thinking or having an idea of that photo to begin with, your two versions could be completely different. And it's not always a bad thing, but it's good to keep in mind. 12. Color Correction: All right, here we are in a Lightroom Classic. Now remember, if you're using Lightroom Classic or if you're using the cloud version, it won't matter. The same principles will apply if you're using any other kind of software. Then I assume that all the terminology here is pretty much identical to any other kind of software or have similar terminology. But for this purpose we're going to be using Lightroom Classic, because that's what I prefer. Here's a street photo that I took at night on the streets of. Was this Tokyo? I think this was Tokyo in Japan. As you can see, we have very underexposed photo. To start with, the first step of the process, what I usually do is I first have to correct the angling of this. As you can see, we have this dude, like walking by who's ruining the composition shot and we have a bit of dead empty space going on here. Let's try and fix that first by going into the crop section here. I typically either crop manually, like so, or I pick a preset from here. Right now, I feel like I want to go three by two. Then I'll just start working on the image until I reach a composition that I like. Because when you do street photography, you can't always get the perfect composition going on. Sometimes you have to correct it in post. This looks about right. I'm going to keep it like, so we'll see if there's any corrections to be made. In terms of angles maybe like. Yeah, that seems to work fine. All right, so we have this dude sort of they're just chilling here ordering something I think, or it is outside of a restaurant. I can't really remember. That's what we've got going on in this image. Now, the first thing to do when editing a photo is to look at what we have and all the various colors. For a city like Tokyo, we typically have a lot of you know, shop lights, a lot of neon signs shining up the streets. There's a lot of colors and some of them can be really distracting, or they can work in our favor. So first and foremost, the first step in the process is to color correct. And I'm going to take you through the process of color correction, and I'll explain why that's important. You see, you cannot begin the process of grading down here without fixing up all the technical details of the image first. Like in this case, we have an under exposed image and we have to even out everything, bring down the highlights, lift the shadows, make the image look correct in its natural state. Only after that can we go into the actual color. Because what happens if we start the opposite way and we do the color first, is we're going to introduce a lot of style. But then we would have to go back and do the technical changes anyway. That color might look differently or that style might look differently when we correct the image in its natural state. So we don't want to do double work. That's why it's always recommended to do color correction first and color grading last. So let's begin by talking about color correction. In this case, we have to, first and foremost in this case, I want to bring down the highlights a little more. I didn't properly expose for the highlights in this frame. We're just going to bring it down just slightly like so. Now the image is evenly dark. Now it's time to start bringing those shadows up. Bringing that exposure up first. We're going to start off with the exposure. We're going to start dragging this lighter, see where we end up. We're going to always go too far and then pull back. It's always the best way to go about doing things in terms of exposure. We're just exposing the image by say 11.5 stops, cool. Then we're going to go into the shadows. We see the shadows are pretty crushed. And because this is shot in raw, we could pretty much drag the slider as much as possible. And as you can see, we can get away with a lot here because we shot this in raw because there's a ton of information. We have so much leeway here in playing around with the correction aspect of this photo. So we're going to start bringing the shadows up again, like go too far and then start bringing it down because it's okay that some of the parts are crushed. It's just in the natural state of how the image is. We don't want to overexpose anything. Now that we've done that, you'll notice that what I do is I constantly go back and I tweak a little bit. Now the highlights are too strong. Again, I'll start bringing those down. The exposure might be a little strong, bring it down a little more like. What you can do is pay attention to the histogram up here if you like. You can click the blue show highlight clipping and shadow clipping and highlight clipping. When you activate this, the blue color is for when the shadows are crushed with highlight clipping. It's going to be the opposite and it will be a red line showing you where the photo is clipped. And then, you know, the overexposed shot. Now we're going to bring this back. Okay, now that we're satisfied with the exposure, we might change it up a little bit later. Let's move on to the following sections here. In terms of presence, I typically, when I do these cinematic street photography shoots, I like to bring the clarity down a little bit. But if you go too far, you see the images becoming all too hazy and all the information is blended together. It looks really ugly. What I prefer is I like to bring down the clarity to maximum around -15 but sometimes I go for just minus ten. Just add a little bit of the softness highlights with texture. I actually like to bring texture up just slightly. Maybe we'll stop around plus seven now. Moving on, we have the haze. With haze, you can either add haze or remove haze to introduce more contrast. If I remove some of that haze, you can see the same softness is appearing here. Or I can go the opposite way and I can introduce a bit of contrast. In this situation, I think I want to bring it down a little bit and add a little bit more contrast just like so not too much. I'm pretty happy with that right now. When it comes to the vibrant and saturation slider, I feel like saturation is too strong of an effect. I like to first and foremost bring down that saturation so the colors don't pop that much. Then if I want to reintroduce a bit of that coloring, I might add a little bit of vibrancy. I'm not going to do it in this situation. Instead I'm just going to bring down the colors. Because when you bring down some of that saturation, you are creating more of like a movie feel into the photo. Because the colors aren't too strong, they're not too present. You feel like you're in an alternate world when you do this now. Then I typically move over to the tone curve. In the tone curve I like to work on. If you don't know how the tone curve works, I'll tell you real quick. You can see here that this is pretty much identical to the histogram up here. This area right here is the shadows, and the darks here are the mid tones, here are the highlights. What I like to do is pull this slighter until I get the desired effect. To do that, we have to create points. Because if I start moving this around just like so, then it's going to affect the entire scope right here. Which we don't want. I just want to affect, say, the shadows in this case. And bring them up a little bit more by introducing some fade. What I'll do is I'll create a little bit of point here. Which means that when I start lifting those shadows and introduce that fade, it's only going to affect the dark areas there with a little bit of that hazy effect, we're moving more and more closer into that world of cinema. What we also could do is make a point right here in the mid tones and play around with that a little bit so we can add more of contrast. You can see these areas and areas in the face and the general midtones here. We can see that that's being affected. As I pull this up and down and it becomes more contrasty, I don't like to exaggerate this, so I'm just going to move a little bit up. And same thing with the upper areas here might introduce a little bit more just like. So if I want to bring down some more of these highlights, then I can start bringing this down as well. So now you'll notice that when you make these points as you click on them, the curve might move. Now the curve move just because I clicked on it and it might mess up your image. The way to solve that is when you click on any of these points, you hold in the Alt key. Because then you can freely add as many points as you want without affecting the curve itself. Here, I would say I'm pretty happy with the overall color correction aspect of this photo. Now if I want to, I can go back and I can check, is there anything else I want to fix? Maybe I'll play around with the shadows just a little bit. Maybe I'll add a little bit of manual contrast. Actually, I'd like to remove a little bit of that contrast to -13 just to soften the image up a little more. This is now a photo that I could say that I'm satisfied with just when it comes to the color correction aspect of this. What we're going to do next is where I'm going to go into turning this into a style. I'm going to show you all the various ways that you can use these color panels right here, the color mixer, as well as the grading here as well to create an effect. For now, we're going to skip this. I'm just going to hop right down. If I wanted to, I can reduce a little bit of the noise if we see any noise going on here. I can just increase this luminance lighter a little bit. So or I can use the AID noise function for that, but it doesn't bother me too much because I will actually be applying some grain to this. I'll zoom in, I'll add about, say, 20 inch grain. So I'll change up the size a little bit, the roughness of it. I usually like it to be fine like this. I'll leave it at that calibration. We're not going to be talking about calibration, that's more of an advanced tool. We're going to leave that for now. Next up we're going to be talking about color grading and the color mixer to create a style. 13. Color Grading: All right, welcome to part two of the photo retouching series here at this Japanese photo. So first and foremost, I like to go into the color mixer to just spot all the different colors that we have to work with. We can see right here that we have some greens, some cyan. We have some blues over here. We definitely have yellows. We have oranges and reds automatically, just because it's usually what the skin tones consist of. But we also have some additional reds here. Additional oranges, Additional yellows. Now, that's all fine and dandy, but if we want to create a style, we actually have to start removing or changing up some of these colors. Let's say we're going for a blue cinematic style in all of this, the first thing I'd like to do is make sure the hues match. In this instance, for instance, we have these yellow lights. We can start pulling them in either direction. To match it with the rest of the photo, I want to make them slightly more orange like. So then we have the greens. Some of the greens as you can see, moving toward the warmer hues, and some of the greens are more toward the emeralds. If we're making a blue cinematic style, I want to push this in the direction of emeralds. I'll take the greens. And as you can see, if we go by left, we're making them more marsh land, yellowish orange. And if we move in the other direction, we're pulling more toward the emeralds. I'm not going to go too far, but I'll push them up here to maybe like plus 16. Then I'm going to look at the aquas and the blues here because they are two separated, I believe, channels right here. Let's see what happens if I start changing up the aquas. As you can see in the bottom part here, we get some effects on this puddle. But definitely over here, I'm going to start moving them more toward the blues like so. And then I'll grab the blues, I'll push them a little bit back so that we even out. So we have approximately the same color going on on this stripe right here. Purples and magentas. If I move them around too much, I might affect some parts of the skin tones. I don't like to touch purples and magentas, but as you can see, we also have it on the flowers here in case I want to do something with that. In this case I don't want to, so I'm going to leave it at that. After the hue slider, I typically move over to saturation. In saturation now, we're going to start deleting or reducing some of the colors off of this image. We might take a look at the aquas and the blues here and just see what's up. If I bring these down, they're not as intense. I definitely like the look of that because you can see it's distracting when I go to the right and it's too intense. It's distracting. I want to remove some of those aquas. Let's see what happens if I do the same with the Blues. Yeah, we're let's put this on Max. We're cleaning up the sign here and we're cleaning up the blues over here. That are distracting but for all the wrong reasons, there's no reason for me to have that there. I'm just going to remove it like so. Then we're going to move into the reds. We have some strong reds going on here. I'll see if this has some effect on the skin tones. I'll move it all the way down. Remember, always exaggerate and then pull back and see if it had an effect on any of the skin tones here. Yeah, we can see it a little bit on the ears. A little bit of the hands don't want to go too far, but I'll bring it down to the same amount as 60, so it blends in all nice and clean. Next up, let's talk about the yellows, oranges and yellows. Let's do the oranges first. If I start bringing the oranges down, you can tell that's typically the skin tones. I think they're the most prominent in the orange sections. Oranges, I typically like to leave alone, and yellows sometimes affect the skin tones as well. But in this case, it doesn't really seem to do that. Let me check that out. No, it doesn't touch the skin tones whatsoever. I can freely play around with the yellow tones, and those, as you can see, are really, in my opinion, ugly. We want to go for that colder style, so we need to remove some of that warmth. I'll start bringing these down, not all the way, so it's not completely black and white, but definitely like so like say at -70 we're cleaning up the image of unnecessary colors. That's typically, for me, the first step in the process. Then I move on to Luminance and I see if there's something that I want to brighten up, for instance the hellos. If I bring them down, then I'm bringing down the highlights in that lamp. Again, this is why you don't overexpose the high lights because it can be very difficult to work with them later on, I made that mistake here and now I have to tweak and play around with this until I get it right. As you can see, the middle part of this light cannot be fixed. It's just because the highlights are too overblown and overexposed in that area. But I can do this and introduce a little bit of detail so we can see the text here more clearly. Then I'll go over the greens. The greens are a bit too strong in the background. I'll start pulling these down a little bit so we get more of a dramatic effect. In terms of luminance. I'll bring that down. We're affecting the sidewalk over here, as you can see, like so. And then we'll take the blues that are going to affect the background over there, to darken it a little bit. Looking good. Now what about the reds? Let's see, by darkening some of these reds, we're actually making them, which I like. I'll bring them down to say -30 like. All right, now I'm pretty happy with the colors that we have removed. Now we're going to start introducing a style by using the color grading function. And this is just like with the tone curve up here divided into three sections, shadows, mid tones, and highlights. The same areas as you see on this tone curve right here are going to be infected as separate channels When we work on these, we're going to start off with the shadows and see if we want to play around with the shadows. I actually like the naturally looking black shadows. Some people like to go for the Tl and orange look. In this case, they will just go this way. And I do the same thing here. I just pull it all the way. Then I slowly bring down that saturation until we have something going on. Now we could introduce a little bit of blues or cyan here. A little bit of teal may be a two, but I'm not going to go for an overly teal and orange type of style. Then we move on to the mid tones and the highlights here, depending on the style we want to go for. If we're going for that colder style, we could start introducing some harsher blues like so, and bring down that saturation and start working our way up again just so we get a bit of a cooler feel to it. We don't want to go too far. Typically, when I grade, I leave it between saturation eight and say 20. That's usually the limits. For me, it's not too obvious, but I'll stay at around saturation 11 on this one, I don't want to go too far. And with the highlights, we can do the same. We can either go for some blues and make it really icy emerald blue like so. Or we can create some, a split toning effect. In this case, we could be moving more toward the warmer tones, to respect the natural colors of the lamps, of the light sources, and of the skin tones. I might just introduce a bit of warmth right here. Let's say plus 15 or so. We have a style going on, right? Because if we look at the before and after, this is the photo we started with. This is how it ended up. Very mute colors, very pushing toward the emeralds, toward the blues. And this is the way you would create a style that's not overly exaggerated in your street photos. Now, we could also reset all of these, because now that we have our base, we've already corrected everything to the best of our ability. We've already corrected the tone curve as well, so that we're satisfied with the exposure and the overall technical correctness. We've removed the colors we didn't want, we've introduced new colors. Now let's start playing around with, say, a warmer hue To all of this shadows, a leave as is. But if I wanted to create a little bit of a warmer feel overall to this image, I would then start playing around and start moving in the direction of the oranges, yellows like. So. Then I would bring it down and introduce it just a little bit, so we introduce some of that warmth. And it's not too obvious either. We can do the same with the highlights here, but we could do it maybe more toward the yellows instead of the same oranges. We could even out the colors a little bit. In this case, let's say saturation eight. In this case, we're creating more of a warm tone feeling to this. Here's the before and after. Here we have the warmer image. The previous one was a colder version of it. But you see how much creative freedom you get after you've already corrected and done things correctly over here. In that case, you can create a whole bunch of styles just by playing around with the color grading and the color mixer. That's how you do it step by step. This is how you color correct, this is how you grade. Then when you move further down, you could choose the noise. Using the AI or the manual slider can choose to remove some potential chromatic aberration which is just color cast the appear in the separation between colors. We can see a little bit of chromatic aberration right here. As you can tell that function helps to remove that or to mend it to the best of its ability. We're not going to do any of these special effects or anything because maybe not every software has it. But here you can add some fake blur in the background if you want to create a, as if you were photographing with like an aperture of 1.2 or something like, you can fake that effect. Then we also have the grain right here that we added. We could add a bit of vignetting like so, because for this photo, I think vignetting would work. Typically, I don't like using vignetting, but as you can see, you're creating this dark mask in the corners. We really want to drag the attention of the viewer from this light shining up on the subject. It might actually help out with that if we do add a little bit, say -15 right here with the post crop vignetting effect. Now we have a pretty cool photo. All right, that's pretty much it in terms of color correction and color grading. The point is just to look at the photo, see what you already have to work with, and decide what you want to do with those colors. Then add or remove colors using the color mixer. And finally start adding that style using the color grading panel. All right, so that was the overall crash course process of my workflow in light room to create a little bit of a movie feel in my photos. Hopefully you can use this at least as inspiration. Good luck to you. 14. Finding Inspiration: Becoming better at your craft is like a muscle. It's something you have to constantly entertain and constantly work on. One way to do it besides the obvious, which is continuously shooting and continuously trying to be better. The other half of that is inspiration. Finding inspiration and using that in your own craft or in your own photography. And there are several ways that you can achieve that and find inspiration for the type of street photography that you want to do. I'll take you through some of the ways that I personally do it. First of all, we go back to one of the previous points which is creating Instagram collections. This is where I will create collections of certain styles or certain colors or certain photographers and their photos. Whenever I scroll down Instagram or I do an active search and I find a creator that I like or I find them through reels. I will then save their photos on their profile to those collections. They might have a particular style in color grading that I like. They might have a particular style in the themes and the subjects they're picking. They might have a particular style in where they take the photo and what kind of weather season. And I will save all of those photos in these collections to look back on and use as inspiration when I go out to shoot something similar. One more thing I do when I actually save these photos is that I actively analyze them. I will literally take out a paper and pen, and I will start analyzing why their photos turn out the way they did. So I might like something about that photo. Or I look at the photo and I go, I like this, why do I like it? And I ask myself that and I start writing down, is it just the color grading? Is it the subject? Is it all things in combination? Or maybe I just like a part of that photo and not a different part. But I have to understand what it is that I like and don't like and why. Because this will help me later on when I take photos to create more of an intention in the photos that I take, I'll be able to either recreate something that a different photographer has done or to create something original based on various inspirations from that photographer and three other people. But I have to know why what they did works. But keep in mind that, for starters, it is okay to steal. If you find a photographer that you like and you want to recreate an exact looking photo as that photographer and you want to grade it in the exact same way, go ahead and do that. It's completely fine. It's going to help you in the process of discovering your own style. It's going to help you, you know, analyze inspirations better. And by recreating what somebody else has done and you do it well as well, then you can use that same sort of technique or that same sort of mindset in taking photos and create your own styles in your own versions and your own twists and things. So steal if you have to, don't feel ashamed of it. Besides saving things to collections in terms of still photos from other people that you're inspired by, especially if you're aiming for the visually strong street photos that remind you of movies. What you can do then is watch movies that have a distinct style to them. What I do is I open up a site called Letterbox.com which is essentially just a website, like a social media website for people who like to watch movies. Where, amongst other things, you can save like Instagram collections. You can save lists, lists of movies in a particular style. So you can just go to the search bar. You can search for any query, and you can find lists of either a particular style, a particular director, or movies similar to the kind of the one movie you're thinking about that you like. There's lists that are super creative on any topic, on any director, or on any actor. People will create these lists. And what I do then is I create my own list, my own sort of visual style inspired list. Personally, I really enjoy, for instance, the movies by One Car Y, and I might be looking at movies like In the Mood for Love or Chunking Express. And I will use them as a visual guideline. In my grading process, what I can do is I can take one of these photos, like a still frame from that movie, and I can implement it or import it into light room. And as I'm retouching my photo, I can use that other photo as a reference point and grade it. Similarly, you can do this in any other kind of style, any movie that you like that has sort of a distinct style to it. You can take Barbie, you can take Oppenheimer, you can take the Matrix Bladerunor, anything you like. But in your photography journey, it's not just about looking at other people's photos, but it's also about watching movies. All of these things are part of the research and inspiration process in taking photos. So don't shy away from watching movies because movies are not photos. Because think about it. Movies and photos are closely related. They're sort of like cousins to each other, right? The art itself is different, but the ingredients are similar. You're using similar composition techniques when you take a photo versus when you do movies. You're using similar lighting techniques. Like the way you place your subject in relation to light, the way you create style with silhouettes, all of that is just similar ingredients of the same or of a different art. So they are related. So don't shy away from watching movies and saving photos and going to galleries, and going to the cinema. All of this is going to be important for that inspiration process. Because in the end, you've got to keep your mind sharp and you've got to always look for inspiration so that you can see how you can improve your own nighttime street photography. We can't always produce completely original work on our own. Sometimes we have to look to other work to help in the process of making our own. 15. Hit The Streets: All right, now finally we're reaching the final and most interesting and exciting assignment of all. Now it's time to actually, with your preparations and with your warm up that you've had to go out, hit the streets, and start taking some proper cinematic nighttime street photos. There are no rules to this. I want you to just use your entire creative freedom and achieve any kind of looks, any kind of styles. Anything in street photography that you take that you think is a good photo, And we'd all love to see this. So when you're taking these photos and after you've graded them, after you have like a final photo that you're happy with, you can post it in our Facebook group. We're going to give you feedback if you ask for it, or you can simply share that photo with us and share your socials so that we as photographers can follow each other on social media and help each other out on the journey. Also as a final reminder, please make sure to leave a rating and review for this course as it helps me tremendously with the algorithm. And with that I leave you. I wish you best of luck on your journey and I hope to see you another time.