Street Photography: A Beginner's Guide to Capturing Action on the Street

1. Introduction: Men. Quick question. Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt you. I'm a street photographer. I take photos of interesting people I meet. I just love you little, I'm interested. All right, can I take your photo? Yeah, sure. Street photography challenges you to leave your comfort zone and think on your feet with your camera. It teaches you to capture decisive moments in the middle of the action. Hi there, I'm James and I am a street photographer. I've around ten years of experience taking photos on the street. I also have a Youtube channel where I've shared many videos including POV Photo Walk videos, studies of Photos and photographers, and general street photography teaching videos. I've spent many hours on the street with my camera, taking photos, interacting with strangers, trying to find parking. There's just so many cars and not enough to put the cars. I have been to many cities and I've been in a plethora of situations, many positive situations, some challenging situations, and some rather bizarre situations as well. Now you may be asking, what is this class about anyway? Great question. I like you already. In this class, you will learn the fundamentals of street photography. Everything from what camera and **** combinations will work best for your goals in capturing the action. To different techniques you can use for settings and how they will affect your photos, to helpful mindsets to hit the street with, for interacting with strangers. And how to think about composing your photos in an intentional way, and so much more. Now in this class, there will be a rather casual environment. If you've seen any of my Youtube videos, you know that I can be a silly guy. And so I hope we can have some fun together now, you may be like hey guy, who's this for anyway, huh? And I would say if you have a phone, if you just picked up a fancy new camera, or if you're a seasoned photographer trying to step into a new realm, this will help you jump into street photography with a solid foundation to solidify what we've learned along the way. There will be a class project where we share five photos utilizing the principles that we've learned. Overall. My hope is to give you a sound mental framework so that you can enjoy yourself and be effective in your street photography. Thank you so much for checking out my class and I hope to see you come along. 2. Class Overview: Well, hello there. I see that you have click buttons and you have chosen my class. And I really appreciate that. I want this class to be so helpful for you that it hurts, Hopefully by the middle, you're just in tremendous amounts of pain. So let's get orientated. Shall we have a lot of topics to cover? And I want to put them in an order that does not put the cart before the horse or should I say the **** before the camera. But speaking of lenses and cameras, let's talk about what you need for this class. You will need a camera with a **** on it, and this can include a phone as well. Feel free to do this entire class with a phone for camera gear. I recommend a simple and versatile set up that is comfortable for you and perhaps you have some experience with. Also, you need some sort of device that can edit photos. I recommend really any computer that can run a photo editing app, So in 1984, Macintosh might not be your best bet. For this particular class, I would recommend a text processing course instead. Speaking of text processing, I do also recommend a sturdy note taking app or physical notebook, Whatever tickles your fancy for taking notes as we go along. There will also be a guide book in the project description section that you can download and I would encourage you to utilize that as well for a deeper learning experience. Let's talk about who this is for. Whenever I go on photo walks with my friends, I am always challenged and inspired by them in some way or another. Perhaps they have a level of creative open mindedness that I appreciate. Or they have a piece of gear that they utilize to accomplish a certain look. Or perhaps their photos are so good that they make me feel physically sick. Either way, we can all learn from each other. And I would encourage discussion so that we can share experiences and share our knowledge to listen directly after this one, I'm going to be talking about the exposure triangle and the technical fundamentals of photography. Please feel free, if you are a seasoned photographer, to watch as much or as little of that as you want to. But I do want this to work for everybody. I know we're all hitting this from different points in our journey, but either way, wherever we are in our journey, we all have something to share with each other. Now I want to talk about cause and effect when it comes to street photography, I think it's beneficial to think in terms of cause and effect as opposed to right and wrong. This will allow us to think more critically about what the outcome will be of any given decision that we make. And as we're going through this class together, as we're discussing everything, as we go along, all of our experiences, the photos we've taken, as we look at other people's photos and talk about them, I want us to be thinking in terms of cause and effect. This allows for a much more three dimensional picture of how to go about street photography in a way that helps us accomplish our goals. It's much more functional than just saying something is correct or incorrect. There will also be a class project for that project. We will be taking five photos on the street, editing them and sharing them to the project gallery. Me included. Now in terms of photo must, each photo must involve a street scene. I know surprising utilize compositional thoughtfulness, establish a clear and defined subject. And I also want you guys to challenge yourself according to your street photography goals in terms of the types of photos I want to see. Candid of strangers, street portraits of strangers, not of friends, city scapes, urban exploration with or without people, and aerials. Two. And all of the guidelines for this project can be found in your guide book as well. Even though five is the number for the project, I will be encouraging you guys to take other photos along the way around different topics that we will be covering. Now, the community guidelines for this class are quite simple and I would expect you guys to follow them. Be kind. Discussion and critiques are encouraged if they're the kind variety. And discuss in terms of cause and effect as opposed to right and wrong. But with all of that said, let's get to learning, gang. I'll see you on the next one where we talk about the exposure triangle. 3. The Exposure Triangle: Hi friends. This lesson is about the technical fundamentals of photography. We're going to discuss the exposure triangle, and we're going to discuss camera modes and settings. First, the exposure triangle. This is the exposure triangle. We have aperture, we have ISO, and we have shutter speed. First, let's talk about aperture. The aperture is the hole in your **** that light comes through. The bigger the hole, the more light comes in. The smaller the hole, the less light comes in. The aperture size is represented by a counter intuitive number. The smaller the number, the larger the hole, the bigger the number, the smaller the hole. The aperture also controls how shallow your depth of field is, or how much is in focus in your frame. Now let's talk about ISO. Your ISO is how sensitive your camera sensor is to the light that is coming in. The higher the ISO number, the more sensitive it is. Now, a couple of things happen when you raise your ISO. One is your image gets brighter. Now that's to be expected. You also listen dynamic range, your colors get all weird and your photo generally gets more mushy looking. But you also introduce sensor noise, which is not to be confused with film grain. On digital, you get sensor noise on film, you get film grain. Sensor noise is often regarded as being not so pleasing, while film grain is often regarded as being quite wonderful. Iso noise is a bit more digital looking, a bit more crunchy looking, And I think it's important to note that ISO noise is not necessarily something that needs to be avoided. It really just depends on the goals for your photo. And finally, we have shutter speed. There are little doors in front of your sensor that open and close. Push your shutter button or the picture take button. Those doors are your shutter. The length of time that those doors are open is your shutter speed. This is also represented by a number. The longer your shutter is open, the more light comes in and the more motion is introduced into your photo. Now as you may be noticing, the whole exposure triangle can work together to change the look and feel of your photo. Now let's look at some photos to visualize this exposure triangle thing. First, we're going to talk about ISO, and what we have before us is a very, very underexposed photo. This photo was actually taken in a parking garage, but what I did with my camera settings was limit how much light was coming into the camera. The aperture is at 22 and the shutter speed was at one 8000th of a second. This is letting very little light into the camera. Now, this photo is at ISO 100, But let's move to a photo that is at ISO 800. So you can just see the faint outline of the windows of the parking garage coming into view, This is ISO 1,600 ISO 3,200 ISO 6,400 ISO 32,000 and ISO 409,600 Now, we can learn a lot from this photo, because the ISO is so high. Or I have, in other words, had to push the gain so hard. It's introducing different effects to the photo. The photo is very soft, there's a lot of noise, and there's some weird color shifting that's occurring. The more light you're allowing to hit your sensor, the less your camera has to push in order to achieve a correct exposure, resulting in a cleaner looking image. Now let's talk about shutter speed and motion blur. Here's a couple more test photos that involve rain. Ah, rain, Bad for the camera, good for the photos. The shutter speed on this photo is at 11 60th of a second. And you can see that it has created this very pleasing texture of rain. Now this photo was taken at one 50th of a second, and you can see that the rain is so blurred now that it's actually becoming less prominent. Now with this photo, we go the opposite direction. Now we're at one 4000th of a second, and the rain is completely frozen into visible droplets. Now, there's nothing wrong with the one 50th or the one 4000th of a second photos, but I personally find the 11 60th of a second photo to be the most pleasing. These photos demonstrate that different photos give you different shutter speed, sweet spots. It's not that if you want motion blur, you have to go to the slowest, hand holdable shutter speed possible. Or if you don't want motion blur, you go all the way to one 4000th of a second. There's a lot of play and creativity in the middle. Here are a couple more photos where we have rain coming off the roof. This one was taken at one 50th of a second, and you can see that the rain is rather blurred. And then this one was taken at one 200th of a second. You can see that it's a lot less blurred. But also you can see that as the rain falls down, it becomes more blurred as it reaches terminal velocity. Very interesting effect and I definitely prefer this one. Now let's talk about depth of field, or how much is in focus. With this photo taken at 1.8 you can see that the lights in the foreground, which we are focusing on, are in focus, and the lights all the way in the background are completely out of focus. Now to this one at F five, you can see the lights are a bit more in focus. And finally, on this one, at F nine, you can see a lot of detail in the background. Once again, we're at 1.8 you can see that the sign is in focus and the background is rather out of focus Onto F five, you can see that the sign is in focus, but the background is now much more in focus. And finally, F nine, the sign is in focus. The background is very in focus. Now I'm going to touch on file formats because it changes how much you can push your image. In editing, the raw format is the most flexible and you have a ton of data to work with in editing. The Jpeg format gives you a sliver of the data that you would get with raw and it is a lot less flexible in editing. Here are two photos of the same scene where I intentionally blew out the highlights in the sky. What we're going to do is we're going to see if we can bring these highlights back. So let's start with the raw photo. You can see I'm in light room pulling the exposure down and a lot of the detail in the sky actually comes back. We have some clouds, but there are still certain points that are blown out. You can only push a raw photo so far here in the Jpeg, I'm doing the same thing and you can see that, that sky is just not coming back very sad. Now, this is where we want to take a look at our histogram. We'll talk about the histogram more in the editing lesson, but for now, take a look at the right hand side. Do you see that line going all the way up? That's our whites, that is the sky. That means that those whites are clipping, the detail is not there currently. Now, sometimes you can bring some of that detail back. As I move the exposure down on the raw photo, you can see that we're getting a lot of that back. It's moving downward into a white blob and moving to the left. That means we're getting the detail back. But you can still see that there is a white tower that just will not come down. And that means that that detail is gone, it's not coming back. As we move the exposure down on the J peg, you see that once again we have a white Tower of Doom. But the difference between the Raw and the J peg is that with the Raw, I was able to bring back a lot more detail than with the J peg. Shoot with whatever you want. I'm just here to show you the limitations. Now listen, there's nothing inherently wrong with blowing out your sky. It just depends on if you want that or not, or if you want to be able to recover your sky in post or not. Now, here are a couple of photos where we have the opposite problem. These are a bit too dark. Now what I've found is that shadows tend to be far more forgiving than highlights. But if you do under expose your photo and you have to bring it back in post, you may end up with a degraded image. So I recommend getting your exposure as close to right on the street as possible. As we bring back the raw, all the details come back and you see that we have a perfectly usable photo. As we bring back the J peg, those details come back, we end up with a usable photo once again. But there are differences in what you're going to be able to do in the edit between the Raw and the Jpeg. Okay, now let's talk about camera modes. The camera mode you choose will determine how much control you have over your camera settings. Now if you're using a phone, which is great, you will probably be operating in more of an automatic ish kind of mode. Although you will probably have some level of touch control over your settings. There are also other apps that you can download that will give you more control. Now, if you're using a mirror list or DSLR camera, then you will be able to have ultimate control over your camera settings. But that doesn't mean you don't have an automatic mode. And that's the first mode I want to talk about. Now, this mode has some real benefits. It will allow you to take the technical thought out of the equation completely and focus on composing your photos and being creative or interacting with people. If that's what you're up to, then there's program mode. And I personally find this to be the most difficult mode to understand. And it's never been my mode of choice, but this is how it works. You choose a set point, and I use that term very specifically. You choose a set point for your aperture, which means you pick a point and the aperture number hovers around that point. It's not locked in in the same way it is in aperture priority or manual mode, which we will get into in just a second. It will choose your shutter speed for you and it will choose your ISO for you, or you can choose your ISO. I should also mention that from what I understand, P mode differs a little bit from camera camera. Now, if somebody is just starting out and they want to step out of automatic mode, I would encourage them to step into aperture priority mode. It's a very simple mode to understand. I spent a lot of time in this mode over the years and I think it's a great place to start if you want to begin to gain a better understanding of what is happening in the exposure triangle when you're taking photos. And like I said, aperture priority is very simple. It allows you to prioritize your aperture. Shutter priority is the same thing, but it allows you to prioritize your shutter. Now, in both of these modes, you can also choose the ISO manually, if you like. But then there is manual mode, the most daunting mode of them all. But manual mode is great because it allows you to have full technical control over your camera, as well as full creative control over your photos. If you want to start shooting in manual and you don't know where to start, what I would recommend is going out, setting your ISO as low as possible, putting your aperture at a very manageable place, something like F45, and start pointing in different directions. Move around the environment while adjusting your shutter speed to compensate. And then set your shutter speed somewhere and start doing the same thing, but this time you're moving your aperture around. And then if the scene asks for more ISO, then you can push your ISO up. And by doing that, what's happening is you're teaching your brain how to deal with all three parts of the exposure triangle. It will become intuitive, but it will take time and practice. When I go out, I tweak my settings according to whatever environment I'm in. And then I also think about the goals for my photos that day. Say for example, I want to introduce more motion blur into my shots. Well, like I said, I can do that by slowing down my shutter speed and then I tweak my other settings to compensate. Or let's say I want there to be more in focus. I can change my aperture to something like F nine or F 11 to allow for a deeper depth of field. More in focus. Bob uncle, or all the way to F 22, where everything is in focus, even the dust on your camera sensor. But with all that said, that's about it for this one to recap. Today, we spoke about the exposure triangle, which is made up of aperture, ISO, and shutter speed. We also spoke about camera modes, which are made up of automatic mode, program mode, aperture priority mode, shutter priority mode, manual mode, and we spoke about various other settings. All of these things allow you to control how your image looks and feels. Maximum technical freedom, maximum creative expression. Now I want you to go out and experiment. And come back and share some photos. And share in the discussion what you learned. And in the next lesson, we will be talking about how to choose gear. I hope to see you there. Goodbye. 4. Best Gear for Street Photography: Hi friends. In this lesson we're going to talk about the best gear for street photography. Make no mistake, gear does matter. And I want you to remember two words, character and ergonomics. For Us photographers, it's easy to get pulled into this thing called Gear Acquisition syndrome. For the sake of brevity, we could shorten this to gas. Gas isn't necessarily a bad thing, but if it becomes too prominent in your life, you might want to make some changes. Okay. Rest assured that that will be the last digestive system joke in this lesson. Anyway, if you enjoy acquiring gear and you're not going into massive debt to do so, then go for it. But I do find that using this character and ergonomics model that we're going to get into is a good approach. First, let's talk about character. And when you look at that, it's on the screen. Character. Actually, I think this text needs a bit more character. Ah, there we go. So the camera **** you use will change the character of your photos. Everything from your focal length to your sensor size will change how it looks and feels. So each gear choice introduces subtle and not so subtle changes to your image. Your focal length is something I would put in the not so subtle category. It can have a huge effect on your image. And street photographers shoot at focal links like 35 millimeters for a certain effect, 50 millimeters for a certain effect, longer focal links like 200 millimeters for a certain effect, 35 millimeters can give you a very raw and intimate type of feeling. 50 millimeters can give you a more well rounded and polished kind of feeling. And it's a very versatile focal length. And interestingly, this focal length has a similar perspective to what our eyes see. Not in terms of field of view, obviously we have a very wide field of view, but in terms of compression. And what I mean by that, how closely the elements in your scene are squeezed together in 85 or even 100 millimeters. Compression can be used to romanticize the street, and as something like 200 millimeters, we are looking at a lot of compression and we are in a very polished cinematic territory. It's a great way to get some very stunning images photographer. Dan, let's see if I can do this correctly. Vote made this lovely compilation of the effects that various focal links have on a subject and background. Notice how the subjects appearance changes and notice how the background appears either closer or farther away from us. Okay, now let's talk about ergonomics. Ergonomics are important. Ergonomics is important anyway. If you've ever watched one of those sports ball events that humans like to take part in. And you see a photographer running around on the sidelines with, you know, three camera bodies. They have pouches here and there for all of their batteries, SD cards and **** cloths and, you know, like a sandwich. One of the bodies has a wide angle ****, Another body has one of those long white Bazooka lenses. All this gear is good for what they're trying to accomplish. And if they need to capture a player on the other side of the field with their white bazooka **** so that it can get on the cover of something great. But this gargantuan set up might be a bit cumbersome for shooting on the street, and it will affect how people react to you. If you have a smaller set up, generally people will pay less attention to you. If you have a bigger set up, they might be more aware of your presence and more intrigued by what you're doing. And they might come over and have conversations with you about what you're doing. And I found that the Azul Ins can intensify this effect. Now if you're okay with Carl coming over to you and talking to you about, you know how his son took a photography class, then that's great. But just know what you're getting into with that. Said, there's something very special about a simple and lightweight set up. A lot of people like to go out with these Fuji cameras. They are beautiful, they feel wonderful in the hand, and they are very capable cameras. I like to go out with one of my Sony bodies. I have a Sony 16 to 35 millimeter F four. I have a Sony 70 to 200 millimeter four oh, and there's also a 2.8 version of this ****, but I found it to be a bit too large for my purposes. The F four was a really nice, manageable long ****. I also have a 50 millimeter F 1.8 which focus is too slow and I need to get a better one. Well, I used to have a Sony 24, 70 millimeter four. It's a beautiful ****, but I dropped it in New York City 24, 70. I barely knew. I also have a Sony 24 to 70 millimeter F 2.8 right here. I don't tend to go out and shoot on the street much with that one. In terms of camera bags, I have a small brevity bag which I love dearly and use daily. And then I have a larger nomadic Peter Mckinnon bag, which is wonderful for traveling with a lot of gear, but it's also very large and cumbersome. I also have the smaller Mckinnon pack, which is nice and it fits neatly within the bigger bag, but it also lacks the organization that I enjoy with the brevity bag. Now another thing to consider is physical buttons and dials I grew up in and still operate in a church production capacity as well. And I love buttons and dials and sliders that I can boop, turn and slide if you are shooting with your phone, unless you order some parts from Russia or something, you're probably going to have less buttons and dials to play with. It's kind of like playing a video game on your phone versus playing a video game with a controller or a keyboard and mouse. A nice middle ground could be something like a point and shoot. You have to decide which is going to work for you. You can choose to go out with a camera in a few different lenses, because different situations call for different focal links. Versatility is a good thing. Or you can go out with a body and a **** because mastering a simple setup is a good thing. I would encourage you to assess your goals and needs. And if you don't know what your goals and needs are yet, I would encourage you to go out with a simple set up a camera body and a 50 millimeter focal length. Because of its versatility and its unique application in the street photography environment. And an important technical truth to remember is if you are shooting with a sensor size that is smaller than full frame, you are going to be shooting at a focal length that is tighter than the focal length that is printed on the side of your ****. They call it crop factor, but my friends, please remember, it is totally tight to go out with a phone or a potato. If you just want to play pretend, I guess unless you order more parts from Russia. Whatever setup you take out, you'll see what works and doesn't work, and you can make adaptations over time. But hey, with all of those words said, that's about it for this one to recap. Today, we learned that it's a good idea to think about choosing gear in terms of character and ergonomics. I want you guys to think about the photos that you're taking with your current set up. And I want you to think about the goals you have for your photos and then think about how gear can play a role in achieving those goals. I also want you guys to hold your gear in your hand, look at it, feel it, taste it, metal, plastic, metal. And think about any improvements you'd like to make. And maybe these are changes you make now or you make later. We all have budgets, we all have limitations. Whatever you have, don't let it hold you back from going out and practicing. Speaking of which, I want you guys to go out and take some photos and share them with us. Keeping in mind all the things we've been learning about today. Okay, that's it. Next lesson we're going to be talking about a very interesting subject and that is the legality and ethics of street photography. I will see you there. Goodbye. 5. Street Photography Legality & Ethics: Hi friends. In this lesson we're going to be talking about the legality and ethics of street photography. That way we can understand our rights, know how to think about what we're doing when we're taking photos of strangers on the street. And know how to respond if someone confronts us about taking their photo. Let me see your card to take pictures. I don't need it. I want you to delete the photos of mine, which does happen. First, let's talk about the legality of street photography. I must make the disclaimer that I am not a lawyer. This is just a layperson's understanding of the topic. So I would encourage you guys to do your own research. Also, I will be speaking of the laws in America today. So if you are watching and you are not from America, I would encourage you to study your own country's laws either way. I do hope you find this lesson helpful. And later on we'll be talking about ethics, which will have a much more broad application. Okay, So in America, we have the right to take photos or videos of anyone as long as we are standing on public property and the person that we're photographing has no reasonable expectation of privacy. The second we step on to private property, the rules change, and the owner of that private property can choose to prohibit photos and videos from being captured. Generally, if you're standing on a sidewalk or you're in a park, you are standing on public property. You do have to be careful because there are places that look like public property that are not. Shopping malls are a good example of this. They're actually private property. So it's a good idea to ask yourself, who is paying for the land that I'm standing on right now? And if you do happen to find yourself on private property taking photos by accident, somebody approaches you security guard, It's a good idea to be open and honest. Let them know what you're up to and then ask them where does the private property start? This will help them understand that you're not going to be hard to deal with. This might end before it starts. Hi there, How are you? Yeah. I'm just a photographer. I was going to capture a shot of the train coming by. Okay. I can they? Okay. Okay. The private lot? Yeah. Okay. No problem. Okay. Very good. Thank you so much. Now, unfortunately, not everyone knows or cares about your freedom to take photos of them in a public space. So you may have some confrontations. You may have people saying you need permission to take my photo. And that's why this lesson exists. But also in future lessons, we will be dealing with how to interact strangers on the street, and how to deal with confrontations. Another important consideration is publication, or how you're going to be sharing your photos. When you're taking photos and sharing, then there are two pieces. Taking the photos and sharing the photos. If you just want to share your photos on line, Twitter, Instagram, what have you, then you can do that. But if you want to use your photos for commercial use to market a product or service, then you're technically going to need a model release from whoever's in your photo. If you want to use your photos, sell them as editorial or fine art. And this generally includes things like prints and photo books. Then you can do that without a release. A good example of this is the book Humans of New York, right behind me here. I highly doubt that Brandon, the photographer, got model releases from all the people in his street portraits that ended up in this book. He did not need that for that use. However, this is where things can get a little bit confusing. One time I was trying to sell an art print of the One World Trade Building or Freedom Tower in New York City on a print on demand website. It was removed due to a claim by the New York City Port Authority. What's funny about this is I was standing on public property and I was selling the print as an art print. I was, of course, dealing with the added layer of website policies. And they may have made their policies more strict to cover their butts, but it was a weird situation. So that's that. Now let's talk about the ethics of street photography. Here's a great quote about ethics from one of the most famous street photographers of all time. Approach gently, tenderly, and never intrude, never push otherwise. If you use your elbows, it will work against you. Above all, be human Cardia Brison. I love what he says here and I think it's very thoughtful, but there is subjectivity to how one can approach street photography. I think it's a good idea to boil photography down to its core function. When you're taking a photo of somebody, you are simply capturing them, taking their soul. You're not shooting a laser at them, you're documenting something. This can be helpful when you're out and you may feel the pressure of taking photos of people who are strangers that you never met. And you want to take their photo, but you feel it. Or maybe you take their photo and then they come to you afterwards and ask about what you're doing. Things can get a little complicated. It's a good idea to remember to always boil things down when I'm taking a photo of somebody. Generally, the reason why I'm doing it is because I think they're interesting. There's something interesting about them that I wanted to capture. I say all this because we have a very peculiar weighty perception around photographing human beings. While I think there's something to that, I also think it's important to remember that it's generally a rather harmless endeavor to take a photo of another person and share it. Now they may be concerned about how the photo is going to be shared, and if that's the case, just be transparent with them and let them know that you're not trying to do harm. And remember that you're not trying to do harm unless you are trying to do harm, then don't. Now, there are many approaches to the level of aggressiveness to use when you are out taking photos. You have 20% of photographers who are very aggressive. And then the other 80% are moderately aggressive, very stealthy. And I, for 01:00 A.M. not somebody who prefers to make somebody uncomfortable as part of my personality, but also working as a barista at Starbucks. I learned, I spent a lot of time trying to really read the room, read people, and understand how they're feeling. I'm very intuitive to people and because of that, and like I said, other parts of my personality, I hate making people feel uncomfortable and I hate catching people off guard. If you're a street photographer, you don't have to be Bruce Gilden, way, way, way. Also, don't tend to get very excited about extreme close ups with 28 millimeter lenses. I prefer to back up and utilize an entire scene and have a person be a part of that scene, but everybody's going to fall into a different place. And how they go about this, you may want to push yourself out of your comfort zone to evolve you and your photos in that way. But don't feel like you have to be aggressive to be a street photographer. Many of my favorite street photos involve people there 1,000 feet away, or no people at all. Think about your goals and act accordingly. But with all of that said, that's it for this one to recap. In America, you're legally able to take photos of strangers without their permission if you are standing on public property and they have no reasonable expectation of privacy. But how you publish the photos will determine if you need a model release or not. Also, taking photos of people in public and sharing them is generally a harmless endeavor. But you will have to decide how aggressive you want to be as a street photographer. If you have any questions, please feel free to share them in the discussion I'll be around. I will see you in the next one where we talk about healthy mindsets for street photography. See you there. 6. Street Photography Mindsets: Hi friends. In this lesson we're going to be talking about healthy mindsets for street photography. We're going to be talking about the importance of street photography and recognizing that. And we're going to be talking about mindsets like playfulness and exploration, and patience, and going with the flow. And it's important to recognize that there are going to be things that challenge these mindsets in us when we're out on the streets. So that's why it's important to be intentional. First, the importance, I believe that street photography is the most accessible form of photo journalism. It allows us to capture the dynamic ecosystem, that is humanity in these environments. And we can capture things like the beauty and the mundane, the plight of homelessness. Things in our community that are happening that we think are interesting that we would like to share with other people. And it's amazing to think that we can capture these moments, sometimes very big moments, and we can save them for later. When we look at photos from street photographers in the past, we are able to see what things were like back then. And photography has a great superpower and it's the ability to generate empathy between us and other people who aren't like us. When you look at a photo of somebody halfway across the world, they live in a very different culture than you. But the photo demonstrates a certain level of humanity in the, we can connect to them in that. And with photos taken in terrible conflicts, for example, they have the ability to turn statistics back into people again. So our ability to empathize and find compassion in our hearts for people who don't look like us is something that humanity has always struggled with. And I think photography plays a powerful role in that. And photography can inspire people. It can inspire people to travel. It can inspire people to try some sushi that they've never tried before because they live in Arkansas and they think to themselves, let me order some of that sushi and get it door dashed from Japan. This is all the same with video of course, but you just have different dynamics at play. You now have motion and different moments strung together in a story. Now, for many street photography, like all photography is just something enjoyable and it's something that you might use for personal development. My socks are getting wet. But street photography has this unique ability to be challenging in a social way that other photography is not often challenging you in. Street photography often introduces strangers into the mix and interactions with those strangers. This puts street photography into a bit of an intense realm as compared to other photography. And this can be fantastic for personal development. If you're a travel photographer and you're trying to capture a sunset. Yes, the sun is moving. Light is changing dynamics. But on the street, things last for mere moments. It's a very high speed environment. The street is one thing and then it immediately shifts to something else. It's a constantly evolving ecosystem of humanity. That's another thing that I think makes street photography very unique. And once again, if you just want your street photography experience to be pleasant and perhaps therapeutic, you just want to go capture some interesting things and share them with people. Or not share them with people. That's great. But either way you go, street photography has value, and I think this is important to remember. When you're out on the street, you're very focused. You're trying to maybe hit a goal, or you're thinking about the interaction that you're about to walk into for a street portrait. Or the fact that you're going to take a photo of somebody who might be angry with you about it. Remembering these things can be motivating. Now let's talk about planning and discipline. And I think it's important to distinguish these two terms. Planning is an often pre photo walk period where you are thinking about what you're going to try to accomplish and figuring out how to do that with steps. And then there's discipline. And discipline is what gets you into bed on time so that you can wake up at 05:00 A.M. so that you can get your coffee, get in your car, drive across town to the spot that you would pre, plan to be at at this time. So that you could capture a fantastic sunrise photo in a way that you would not be able to capture at noon when it was easy to get out. His street photography is no different than any other practice in the sense that good planning and hard work will unlock new levels for you. Going to the same place over and over can create mastery, but also going to a new place can expand. We can apply the same idea to gear. You can master your current set up, or you can try a new set up. Both have different benefits. And I mean, we could apply this to any number of mindsets that you go out into the street with. So whether in the physical realm or the mental realm, exploring the same territory again and again can help you to master that territory. And breaking out into new territory can challenge you in new ways. You got your refinement land, you got your expansion land. So plan and discipline yourself. Also, exploration and experimentation can be extremely valuable. Street photography thrives on serendipity. You can't know exactly what's going to happen when you're out, and it's a good idea to have a healthy tolerance for that. But what I found is that if you pair some good planning and discipline with a healthy tolerance for flexibility, that's a good combination. And when you're shooting, what you'll find is more often than not, your efforts will moderately pay off. Okay. Okay. Good for good. Okay. Nice. Sometimes they will not pay off at all. I missed it. But then my friends there sometimes where your efforts really pay off. Heck, yeah. Heck, yeah. Heck, heck, heck indeed. But it's very important to have the ability to be patient because sometimes serendipity comes and sometimes it doesn't. And if you can do that, it will help you weather the storm and enjoy the process even when the negative waves of the day are hitting you in the face. And there was a subject that you really wanted to capture, but you took the photo and it didn't work out. For some reason, perhaps it was out of focus. That's photography. No matter what happens, you can choose to enjoy this experience of taking photos and challenging yourself. All the little details. Taking photos, interacting with people. Choosing your response when your camera falls and your **** breaks. Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, this is a good **** is kind of stuck. It won't come off, it won't twist. Okay, there we go. Oh man, the ring is messed up. I hope that the **** and not the camera. Okay, good news, we only broke the **** in this piece, but you can choose to enjoy these things. Obviously, dropping your **** is a harder thing to enjoy. But you can choose your response. You can't choose exactly what photos you're going to get, but you can choose how you do the journey. Impressive tempo on that horn, but with all that said, that's about it for this one to recap. Street photography is valuable for you and other people. It's a good idea to plan and be discipline, work hard. But also it's a good idea to go with the flow and be playful and experiment And have a mind for exploration. Be playful. Wow, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You can take all these mindsets and more and put them all together into a super mindset, and it'll be powerful, and a powerful mindset can pay off. Now I would love to see you guys go out and try to implement some of these mindsets. And feel free to come back and share your experience and share some photos. That's it. Join us in the next one where we'll talk about finding the action. I love you. Goodbye. 7. Finding the Action: Hi friends. In this lesson we're going to talk about finding the action. I have found that I can spend a lot of time meandering and not necessarily finding interesting photos because I have not put myself in the proper environments. Meandering is good for street photography, but it's also good to go to places where serendipity is found frequently. Places of opportunity. First, I want to talk about busy places, places that are busy with people as opposed to other things like, I don't know, hamsters are great places to start if you're trying to photograph people. In New York City is a great example of this. It's a place that is full of people and not only are they people, but they're a unique eccentric mix of people. When you're in a place where there is a high density of people, you will be able to blend in to the crowd more. And that can make for easier shooting, and that can make for good candid shots where you're not necessarily being noticed as much. And also look for places that I like to call transitionary funnels. And a great example of this is a train station. You have a lot of people funneling in to a small area, thus increasing the density. And they're getting on the train to move to their next location. This is why subway stations are so popular because there are great places of opportunity for interesting photos of unique people doing interesting things and people you know and people in costumes trying to get to their convention musicians who are in the place so that they can make some money from all of the people who are coming through all sorts of good things to the subway is sweet. I could jump on top right now. I love the energy in the subway station. It's electric. It's like watching a bunch of ants going to and from their ant pile. It's also very hot. If you are not in a place like New York City, maybe you're in a smaller town. It's a good idea to find the city centers, the gathering points, the places where there are restaurants and coffee shops and ice cream shop shopping for other things that aren't food items, things that you can wear, things that you eat, hamsters. When you find places where people are shopping and relaxing and where they can come to have a conversation. Places where people are going to naturally gather together. That's where you're going to get some gold. The more people, the more opportunities for serendipity. And the more you go out to shoot, the more opportunities you will have for serendipity. And this even works for places that are very sparsely populated. Keep going back to the same spot you're bound to see somebody. I want to talk about the benefits of small towns, because in street photography, the big cities tend to get all of the love. But there are benefits to small towns. So I want you to be encouraged if you do live in one, smaller towns just tend to have less stuff in it. People, cars, trash, parking meters, traffic columns, signs, they often have a wonderful character about them. I'm about to go through the canyon that will take me back into the Salt Lake Valley, but I stopped in a little town called Helper. I was driving by and I thought, oh, that looks very interesting. It's a quaint little town. The population here as of 2017 was 2091 people. So I'm going to explore a little bit. There's a train yard over here that sits right in the middle of town. Bring that up. It's a little dark, the lighting has changed quite a bit interesting. I love taking photos of people and interacting with people, but sometimes it's just nice to be introverted, considering I am an introvert and just wander around empty places and take photos. Something's on fire. I hope that's planned. I can just stand in the middle of the street. The traffic is so light. I mean, this is downtown Crazy what a photograph we look at how outrageous this is. We got two guys here doing a little handshake. Got a bunch of people hanging out, Just having a good time, making various celebratory. Fun, happy motion. This guy's moving his hat around. We probably had a very slow shutter speed which created a lot of this motion blur. We had some people hanging out on top of the train. We got a guy here who is a half ghost person. They're exchanging, what an amazing photo. Wow, this town has a lot of character. This is pretty ridiculous. I saw this one. I was driving in. It's like a 30 foot tall statue of a minor. That helps well, it was fun. Thank you, helper. I enjoyed exploring you now, cities have tremendous advantages. Don't get me wrong, but every place has its own unique value and street photography is not just for big cities. Oh, and another thing is that parking in small towns is way easier. Now, where the heck is my car? Does it respond to my call? Hey, 0. Alright. What's the damage? I also want to talk about scenic areas. People like places that are pretty and shiny. They will gather around them and they will look upon them with awe at the splendor of the majesty of whatever the thing is. People like bodies of water, people like landmarks. The Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco's great example of this. There's all sorts of areas around where you can look upon the Golden Gate Bridge and say, how did that get built? And another great thing about these gathering areas is that you will have a mix of people, but you will also have a mix of interesting backdrops to put those people on. Now another thing to consider is events. I'm really bad at keeping up with events that are happening in my area, but I would encourage you to do so. Because events are street photography and easy mode, they give you a lot of opportunities. One time I went to a Renaissance fair and it was fun. It was like a village in the woods. It was very immersive. There were people dressed up, There were people sword fighting. There were musicians. It was a wonderful time and a great place to take photos. Another example is a lantern festival that I went to in Salt Lake City. There was tons of people there. There were thousands of bags of light flying into the sky. You just can't go wrong there. Most places have events to choose from. And if you're in a place that doesn't have events make your own, you know, you want to have a hamster admiring, gathering, look at the code on that one. Places of activity now these are places like skate parks, basketball courts, beaches, bike paths, places where people are doing activities as opposed to just transitioning from point A to point B, and perhaps they have their phone in their hand. These places are fantastic, and a lot of times people are doing things that require skill and things that are visually interesting. And the Venice Beach Skate Park is a great example of this. I've taken photos there and you have very talented individuals who are doing, you know, triple fake flip twist, grab inversions. Very dangerous. Okay, That's it for this one. Now to recap, remember to look for busy areas, Look for transitionary funnels like train stations. Look for scenic areas like a park with a giant statue of a hamster. Look for places of activity where people are doing interesting things and perhaps things that they're good at. And also remember that street photography is not just for big cities, it is also for small towns. You can do street photography anywhere if you grew up in a place where everything around you seems normal and you're not sure how to extract the value out of where you are, doesn't mean there's not value to extract. So I want you guys to go out with a strategy from today. Take some photos and come back and share those photos and share your experience. I will see you in the next lesson, where we talk about interacting with strangers in a candid way. By 8. Interacting with Strangers: Candids: Hi friends, and this lesson we're going to be talking about interacting with strangers on the street within the context of taking candid photos. And the next lesson we're going to be talking about taking portraits. Interacting with strangers on the street in either one of these capacities is something that can be very challenging for people. Myself included, I have a bit of a turbulent relationship with this part of street photography, as somebody who is an introvert, as somebody who struggles with a fair bit of social anxiety. This is something that can be very difficult for me. And there are many times where I want to go out on a photo walk and just have an easy time of taking photos of people from a distance with the environment or taking photos of no people at all. The other part of me is the part that really enjoys a good flow state inducing adrenaline rush. And enjoys the challenge of putting myself in these socially weird and potentially awkward situations and trying to navigate that. How's it going? May want to play a game. I don't think I want to play your game. So it's important to understand how people operate on the street. Most people are just trying to go about their day. Maybe they're heading to a coffee shop to meet a friend for coffee, or they're heading to a restaurant to meet a friend for a restaurant. Or they are just trying to get from their home to their work. They're in transit. They don't necessarily want to be bothered. And they don't necessarily have the greatest situational awareness all the time. So a lot of times when you're taking a photo of this type of person, they may not even notice you. Many times you won't be noticed when you're taking photos. And of course, that depends on how aggressive you decide to be. But I found in my case that many times I can take photos and be noticed only a couple of times per day. And it's also important to remember that people have schedules. And they did not decide to block out two to 3 hours that day to go take photos of the world. Many times people are trying to get to meetings and they're on a time crunch, and that's an important consideration to go into street photography with. I found that generally people are conflict averse, so if they do notice you taking their photo, they will often look away and continue on. They might turn their head, they might cover their face. Some people will get angry. And you may end up in a situation that is verbal, awkward. Verbally a bit aggressive. Verbally, very aggressive. Got take your photo though, I'll hagan me right now. I don't hang back up. No, you back up. Don't put your Pm on me. You can't be my face again. Alright? It a right? Yes, sir. Right. Have a good day. And every now and then it can become physically aggressive. Thankfully, I've only experienced verbal tussles. Results vary by location. It depends on what city you're in, what part of the city you're in. But it's always a smart idea to have good situational awareness and also think about ways that you can protect yourself. Street geography is generally safe, but things can't happen, and we want to be prepared for that. I will be friendly, I will smile, I will be open about what I'm up to, and I've found that good communication can untie a lot of social knots. Okay, now I want to talk about street photographer personalities. We are all unique individuals and we all bring our personality to the way we approach street photography. And there are many street photographers who are able to inject themselves into people, rich environments, and elegantly flow through those environments, interacting with people, and taking photos. At the same time. There are other street photographers who melt into the scenery a bit more. Perhaps they're less noticed, they have a more gentle and quiet approach. I want you guys to think about what your personality is, what your strengths and weaknesses are, how you want to lean into your strengths, and how you want to develop your weaknesses. What does that look like for you? And if you look at another street photographer who has a certain approach, it can be easy to want to copy that approach. And I don't think there is anything inherently wrong with that. But what I would say is do it thoughtfully. Think about the things in you that are already good and helpful for street photography. And then look at the things that are in that person that you might want to develop in yourself. Think about your personality now and the end goal for your personality. So if you're just starting out and you want to take photos of people and you want to build up your confidence, you have options. You can use the easy approach, where you take easy photos and progressively challenge yourself little by little, more and more each time. Or you can do the hard approach. You can dive into the deep end. Do something extremely terrifying, overcome it, come out the other side, and you will grow intensely doing that. I would also recommend a mixture of the two. You can use both of these methods together. If you're somebody who has absolutely no social hesitancy, I guess just go out and have fun. Whatever you do, the important thing is that you do it over and over. And as you're challenging yourself, give yourself grace and patience. Try not to overthink things, stay in a good flow. When you get in your head, it gets harder to take the shot, but when you push through and take that challenging shot, it feels good. It's a wonderful thing, and it's one of the great things about street photography. Now I want to talk about some candid situations in the resulting photos. Now. First we have this one that was taken in a town near San Diego. And there was a train station and there was a guy sitting on a bench. Now as we go through these, I do want you to keep in mind how the go pro fish is. **** does exaggerate the distance that I am away from people. I actually captured this guy from various angles, but I want to talk about this one which was taken from the other side of the train tracks up high on a ledge. I was actually on street level in the train stations down below street level. This is a great example of a very easy, candid shot. I'm quite far away from this guy. I'm not imposing, I'm unlikely to be seen and if I am seen, he would probably have a hard time knowing if I'm actually taking a photo of him or not. Then we have this one of a surfer also near San Diego. This is one of the prettiest photos I've taken for sure. This one's also a pretty easy shot. I am out in the open here, but I'm also quite far away from the person. I'm in a pretty environment where people would expect photos to be taken of things, you know. It makes sense that I'm walking around in the camera in such a beautiful scene. It's possible that the surfer might notice me here. But even if he does, there's an understanding when somebody is doing something such as surfing or skating, that people might want to take photos of you. And generally, if you're in that state, you're doing something you love, you're in a pretty relaxed mode where if somebody wants to take a photo of you from a distance, especially you're going to be less likely to care. You might even think it's great that somebody is interested enough in you that they would like to take a photo of you doing something that you enjoy. And even if this guy noticed me and had a problem with me taking his photo, if he came over to me and said, hey, what were you taking my photo for Mr. And I showed him this on the back of my camera. He would probably say, oh, could you send that to me? That's beautiful. Maybe not. But I'm not sure how you couldn't like this photo, even if you're in it and you don't like to be photographed. But all in all scenes like this, which are very pretty and you have people occupied doing various active activities, these are great places to begin to take candid photos. Then we have this one, which I call Wheely Guy. This was taken in New York City. He was coming towards me, I held up the camera, took his photo, I think he knew. And here you go. This photo is a little bit more of a challenge. You might be more timid about wanting to pull your camera up as the guy is going by to take this photo, 'cause he's going to know you're taking his photo. And not everybody is going to be happy about that. In this case, of course, he was very friendly, but you don't know when you're taking the photo. Now in this one you can see I turned to the left at sort of a diagonal angle and compose my shot and let him ride into it. This is less intimidating for both you and your subject than you tracking them all the way through. You can certainly do that, but there's just a difference there in how that feels. But let's say this guy was not a fan of me taking a photo of him. Let's say he was doing an angry wheelie that day. And he turned around and he came back. He said, hey man, why did you take my photo? Well, you can easily say you looked awesome. You were riding a wee on your bike in New York City. You looked awesome. Sometimes that will fly and sometimes that won't fly. It really just depends on the person. But it's helpful to think about these things when you're going to take a photo like this because it can give you confidence beforehand knowing that you'll be able to talk to the person about why you decided to take their photo. So it's a good idea to have a compelling and pleasant and even complimenting explanation for why you decided to take somebody's photo. You don't always have that, and for me, my default is I thought you were interesting. Situations like this are really cool because they're positive for everybody. Everybody's happy about what's going on here. I think sometimes we so focused on how things could go wrong that we forget how things can really go right. And a lot of people are very happy and they think it's fun or they appreciate having their photo taken. Okay, next we have this one also in New York City. And this one is a fairly challenging photo to take. I'm pretty close to her. She could look up at any moment and see me. One of the things that makes this a much easier photo though, is that we're in a very crowded space. Being in an environment where a lot of people really makes street photography feel a lot more cozy. The energy just changes. When you're standing out in the open, in the middle of nowhere, you feel a lot more vulnerable. So crowds can really help. They're a good way to practice street photography and gain more confidence. Another one from New York City. And this one, I'm standing across the street pointing directly at this guy standing behind his food cart. And then we have our friend over here on the right who decides to join in. First, he's looking away from me, then he turns towards me and the other fellow shows up. And right then is when I snap the photo. This is a very common technique in street photography to wait for the person to look at you. This one's fairly challenging because even though I was on the other side of the road quite far away, the guy could have yelled at me, you know? He could have. Giving me a stern look of distastefulness. And this one I can't remember exactly who was behind me here, but I'm pretty sure that I was way more out in the open than I was in the previous photo on the subway. And then we have this one taken in Chinatown. One of the most challenging types of photos to take on the street. I am close to him, he's looking straight at me. It's very clear that I'm taking his photo. And you can even see in the video, there's a girl on the left that looks back towards him trying to figure out what I'm taking a photo of. So even she noticed what was going on. This is a go for it and deal with whatever consequences may come kind of photo. These are the types of photos where you just have to decide you're going to take it, commit, take the photo, move along. Smiling at the person is never a bad idea. And always be prepared to kindly explain what you're doing. And remember you're taking their photo because you think they're interesting. What's that? Okay, I'm a street photographer. Okay. Yeah, I just take pictures of interesting people that I find. Yeah, I was just wondering. Yeah, of course. I thought all you guys are interesting. I love your glasses. Thank you. Yeah. Do you mind if I take a portrait really quick with your glasses? Okay. Very good, you guys. I'm just share them on Instagram. I can I can give you my card if you want. Sure. All right. Either way, you guys have a good day. Thank you. Hi. Hi. Are you taking the materials? Yeah, I'm Pictures go. Yeah. Are you in a tube A Oh my God. Yes, I am. You are? Yeah. I'm a street photographer. You? Yeah. Oh my God. Hi. Photo. Well, I'm a street photographer. Street photographer. Oh, yeah. Oh, okay. So yeah. And also make Youtube videos. Yeah. So. So I just recorded my photo walks. Ohio, what's up? Oh, yeah. So I make I record my photo walks. I'm a street photographer. Okay, cool. So you record as you take pictures. Yeah. That's what's okay. That is it for this one. But to recap, we want it anyway, We want to understand how people operate on the street and we always want to be kind, gentle, and respectful of other people's time. We also want to maintain good situational awareness and keep ourselves safe. How many also have I done so far? Anyway, As we want to use our personality, we want to look at what we have in our toolbox. We also want to think about what we might want to add to our tool box that we aren't necessarily so good at yet. That's important to think about. We also want to have times, you know, a lot. We want to have a good strategy for developing confidence. If we're trying to integrate people into our photos, it's a good idea to try to stay in a flow and not to overthink things that makes everything harder. Okay, I want you guys to go out and take some photos. Come back and share some photos. And share some thoughts about the photos and everything we learned today and apply all that stuff and happiness and sunshine. I hope that you guys will join me on the next lesson. I would imagine you would. I hope you found this lesson helpful. I will see you in the next one where we talk about interacting with strangers on the street within the context of taking portraits. Bye. 9. Interacting With Strangers: Portraits: Hi France. And this one we're going to be talking about interacting with strangers. And I'm going to do that by showing you some of my interactions. I'm going to play the interaction for you and then I'm going to share some thoughts on it. We're going to start with general interactions and then we're going to move into a couple of aggressive interactions in the next lesson. So buckle up your seat belts, get your popcorn, like that gazelle. That's great. It's great, Jeff. The first interaction is from Salt Lake City, where I met a gaggle of friendly skaters in front of a beautiful mural. I hear skaters, I see skaters. Man, it's like a whole entourage. Can I take some photos of you guys? Take some photos of you guys. Okay. Sleet. Pretty nice. How's it going? Going pretty good. Good. We got like this, like a skate party, kind of. We just felt like going down this weekend, so we did. Alright. Yeah. Fantastic. All right, what was that? Take a picture of us? Yeah. Yeah. Oh, just do your thing. Well, altogether? Yeah. I was gonna get some shots. You guys skating too though? All right. It's beautiful. It's like a it's like a trap album cover or something. Alright? Hang tight. Alright? 321. Hang tight. All right. 321. Do one more. Thank you guys. All right. I don't have enough cards to give to everybody, so I'll just give you. And you have a channel? Yeah. So I show the photos on my Instagram page. All right. But yeah, if you guys want to reach out, then I can. Yeah. But if you guys just want to skate around, I'll get a couple shots as well. Alright, thank you guys. Thanks. Yeah, here it used to be. Just as long as yours go a little bit more than a year now. Okay, cool. I'm not planning to stop. Nice. Nice. Yeah, I'm gonna grow mine back out to like shoulder length. Dude, it's taking forever. I'm just gonna hang it one spot. Hopefully they'll have been for that spot for me. That's frigging. Awesome. So, where did you guys come from? We came from South Jordan Merton area. Oh, okay. All right. A lot of fun around that. I got you. So, you guys are just all friends, Alright? Alright, See, thank you guys, Have a good day, okay? So this one is a great example of being in the right place at the right time. And a good way to do that is to go out and shoot a lot. Put yourself in the environments where these types of serendipites will occur. Good photos come when preparedness meets serendipity and they shake hands. Another thing I want to mention is good introduction strategies for when you're dealing with groups. Groups can be intimidating. One strategy is to walk up to the group project loudly, but make sure that at least one person can hear you very clearly. Maybe move close to them. Another approach is to find a single person. This could be anybody, but maybe it's somebody who has a sense of leadership and you get the sense they have leadership in the group. Or maybe it's somebody who is off to the side. You can go chat with them and start the process. Once you're ready to take photos, I recommend stepping back, widening your view and looking for the first shots that jump out to you and just go after those shots and let things develop. In this case, I had a wonderful combination of skaters and this mural. I didn't do this here, but you could also go up to individual skaters and say, hey, would you mind going over here and trying this right here? Or hey, can I get a portrait of you? You look super interesting, You go all sorts of different directions, But I do recommend starting with the first thing. It jumps out to you, because momentum is a big part of the equation when you're doing an interaction with somebody. I'm not saying that's the only approach, That's just an approach. And if they want a certain photo, they have an idea. I say go for it. Because for one, it makes them feel involved. But also you can end up giving them something that they specifically wanted from the interaction as a thank you. And in this case, the group portrait was a good thank you for everybody involved. Okay, this next one took place in Houston. I was on a tandem photo walk with my buddy Michael and we ran into a group of guys. Got my. Alright. Alright. Alright. Get close up. All right thanks Brad. I look at me. Al right. All right. A man, appreciate it. Appreciate. What's your name? All right, cool. I'm James. Good to meet you. Meet oh, let's go. A tattoo model may have a good day. Now, one thing to take note about this interaction is how Michael got straight to the point with them. He opened the door. He's very good at this. His approach to starting interactions with people is a little bit different in mind, and I think that's really cool. A lot of times he's not necessarily giving them a lot of context about what he's doing. It's just hi, I'm here. I have a camera I want to take a photo of. You know, as he's doing it. It's photo taking and interacting at the same time. It's a very, very interesting thing to behold. And then came this very playful energy and we all started cutting up while we were taking photos. And that's always a nice thing when you have a nice interaction happening simultaneously with the photo taking. It feels very relaxed and fun. So then I'm looking around for photos and I zero in on this guy who has a very interesting face and went for a close up portrait. And he was totally comfortable and interested in that. He chose his expression for me. And this is always interesting because people give you different things. Some people give you a smile, Some people just give you a, you know, neutral face. Some people act like you're not even there at all. I like that a lot and I like to let the person express themselves however they choose to in the photo. And then I can direct them further as we go on if I want something else. And then we kept flowing with each other. He decided he wanted to show us his back and then he started dancing. It's a good idea to be on your toes 'cause you might get photos you don't expect. And so you want to be ready for that. A lot of times the magic can come in between the things that you've planned to be the magic, so keep your eye out, okay. The next one is from New Orleans. The previous interactions were group interactions. This one is more of a standard portrait interaction. I run into these a lot. There's a guy walks up, very interesting outfit, and I asked if I could take his photo and he said, yes sir. A quick question, I'll learn if I could take your photo. Thank you. Very interesting. Sure. Alright, great, Let's let me picture my flag. Alright, that's important. What's your name? My name's Kelly. Alright, I'm James. Good to meet you. Good to meet you. Where are you from? I'm I'm coming from Salt Lake City. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I've been all over. Okay. Bow and I used to ride the rail. Oh, it's a great place. Yeah, it's beautiful. It's a good spot right here. Let's get this a got if I get you on like, let's see here, let's get you over here in front of this wall. Yeah. Yeah, it's just like, there's not a whole lot going on. I think that'll be nice since you're so interesting and all. Alright, Just right there. Yeah. Yeah, take a step that way for me. Alright? Perfect. Take one more step. That way I want to get that little thing on the wall out of the way. Or it might be able to be, oh, it's just a leaf. Okay. We're good. Yeah. Stay right there. Trying to get hit by a truck Today, you got to keep me safe. I drop a chance a little bit for me. There you go. Right. Let's see. I get your necklaces too. They're interesting. One more like that. Sorry bit of perfectionist today. There you go. Okay. Thank you for your patience, sir. I appreciate it. Welcome. All right. You have a good day. Did you want my card to show you where it's gonna go? Yeah. Okay. This is my website. I'll give you my website and then you know what Instagram is. Yeah. Alright. I just share them on Instagram. Okay. So you just look for a little Instagram button. Okay. Be all set. Okay. Sir, thank you so much. Thank you. Have a great day. Now, in this case, if you notice, I took leadership and directed him through the steps of the interaction so that he always knew what was going on. I also like to keep my interactions lean, lean towards, having them be lean, not too long and drawn out. And I try to pay attention to the person's body language and see how interested they are in continuing the interaction. A lot of times you can see people are starting to drift and at that point you want to wrap things up and get them on their way. And then in terms of the photos, I quickly found environments to put him in, starting with very simple and nearby options. One was basically where I found him and then the other was on a simple wall. It's a good idea to think about back up photos as well, right? If one doesn't work for some reason, If you have one that's on a very simple wall, there's not a whole lot of variables there where things can go wrong environmentally speaking, obviously you can miss focus. Now, the next one is an interesting situation where I was actually caught taking candis and I wanted to include it so that you could see my response. What's good? I'm just getting some photos of you guys. Sir, I'm a street photographer. I think you guys are interesting. So just keep going. Sweet. Thank you guys. Thank you guys. Have a good night. So once they caught me, I decided I would lean into the interaction, be open about what I was doing. Hey guys, thought you were interesting. Taken some photos of you, Keep it up, and this is a good way to take more photos if they're down with what you're doing and now you've opened the door to a longer interaction. They're now comfortable with you. You can ask them to do things if you want, or you can just let them do their thing, hover around, find different compositions. It's a winning situation. Now, of course, I have to show you guys a situation where I got the dreaded no. Excuse me, brother. Hey, I'm a street photographer. I take photos of interesting people I met. I thought you looked really interesting with your mask because I was jus wondering if I could take a photo. Alright man, have a good day. So when I'm approaching people, I've learned that it's a good idea to do so with a very calm energy. Because if you hit somebody with a ton of energy, you could cause problems. You have to think about the things you have to overcome in their mind. When somebody's walking up to you on the street, they can have any number of agendas. And so if you can make them feel for one, not threatened by you, but feel like, hey, this is a friendly person who has an honest question about something that they're interested in. With no pressure and no over the top energy, that can be very helpful towards getting you to make a connection with this new person. Brandon Stanton, the photographer behind Humans of New York. He has claimed the same approach, so it might be a good one. And like, excuse me, is there any way I can take your photograph? Yeah. Okay. Now, I have a habit of speaking a bit fast when I approach people, but I'm always trying to be friendly and calm. I'm a street photographer. I take photos of interesting people I meet. I thought you were interesting. I was just wondering if you could take a photo really quick. Oh, no, no, no, no. Alright. What's your name man? Kevin. Thank you. Have a good day. Yes. Yes, I wanted that one. I liked his look. But anyway, so I asked him, he said no, and then I immediately flipped into, I understand, have a good day. It's important to me that I end an interaction with the same level of kindness that I start the interaction with. Have a calm and friendly energy. Prioritize good communication. And also pay attention to body language, Okay, bye for now. The next one we're going to look at two rather tense situations. There's a lot to learn. See you there. 10. Aggressive Interactions: Now we're going to talk about some aggressive interactions. Now, a quick word of caution. No physical violence, thank God, but these do get pretty tense, mean words and such. I think these are very important to talk about because while they are rare, they do happen. And we want to have a plan. And the goal, once things escalate, should always be de escalation. And everybody going home, okay? Nobody wins in a fight. We want to avoid that. This first one took place in New Orleans. This fellow started talking to me and asking me some questions about what I was up to. And things went from pleasant to odd and then to totally sideways very quickly. Yeah, what's up? I'm a street photographer. So, you do street photography? Yeah, I do, I take photos of interesting people. I think you're very interesting. Really? Yeah, you might if I take a photo camera. All right, that's fine. Now, that's turn I'll alter, That's fine out so you film interesting things. Yes. So I'll put some out there. Very interesting and positive to work. All right, turnout. Alright, You said turn around. Don't turn it off. Turn it off. Oh white, I'm not gonna turn it off. Okay, Keep it off. Yeah. No, I won't point towards. You do, okay? And I go, alright. 'cause I do something I respect. Uh huh. Helps. I got nothing for you brother. Well, I got white people. Okay. The raffle took $1 million from white people. Check me out. All right. Gotta take your photo though. I'll turn. Hey, me right now, bro. I don't Hey, back up. No, you back up. Don't put your camera on me. Come on out of some aggressive, I will put my camera. You're on the bull ****, you know. Back up. There you go. On the camera bullshit every day. Let's tell you the truth about your camera. I got dude on the camera. It's a bullshitter. He's a piece of ****. He do bullshit every day. I'm let y'all know he's doing bullshit. I told him to go on and feed some homeless people and he said, no, I can't do that because I'm a piece of ****. That's what he said. He said to me, Help kids stay in a man. Get graph on TV with no curse. I get helping the kids stay in school. Gonna do none of that. He's a piece of ****. He's a piece of ****. Let the camera, he's a ****, he don't help nobody car. Now put that on the camera. Now once he switched, and this was very jarring to me because a lot of times you can read body language and see if things are, you know, escalating. This was zero to 100 very quickly right now. In hindsight, I recognize that asking him for his photo again was probably not a great idea. But in that moment, I wish shook it. I was now in a position where this guy is speaking to me in a way that I'm not going to allow. Now, that doesn't mean that I'm going to tell him he can't talk to me that way. I'm going to remove myself from the situation. I'm going to move away from him. He can do whatever he wants. I'm going to go on with my day and go home and be happy. Ego can get especially guys into trouble in these types of situations. If you are somebody who demands respect from somebody and you got to, you know, you have to enforce that with them, that's going to get you into trouble here. You can't do that. It's not a very smart approach to life. You're going to end up in fights, you're going to end up hurt, you might end up dead. Don't do it. And let's just say you win the fight. There's a high probability that your knuckles are going to be all busted up and you're going to have to go to the hospital anyway. You're still losing. Fights are terrible things. Once again, nobody wins. In situations like this, I recommend being assertive, but not aggressive, and have a clear message. In my case, it was, we're done, done talking here, leave me alone. Right? This was helpful information for him, but this is also helpful if you do get into some sort of physical situation, the police are called, you're going to have witnesses on your side. And I know this is a weird territory to get into because this is a street photography course. But if you do get into a fight, you want to have people on your side having a very clear message that you're repeating. That indicates, hey, I'm not the aggressor here. This guy's the crazy one can be very helpful for you in the end. A lot of times what can happen in these situations is people start taking the bait of what the other person is saying. They start interacting with that and then that makes things confusing for everyone else. It can send the message that you're trying to. This is still a conversation and that's the wrong message. The goal is to say, we're not having a conversation anymore. So anyway, keep your message clear. Don't play games, move along. This guy was not letting me move along, but I was trying to move along. This next one is very important, not only for situations like this, but anytime you're out, keep your situational awareness. Watch people watch their body language. This is an example of the wrong body language. But a lot of times, body language cues can be as simple as if somebody's following you with their eyes. Paying attention to what they're up to can be very helpful. An important principle is more attention to your surroundings can buy you more time. And if somebody is being aggressive, put as much space between you and them as possible. Be wise, be calm. Do your best to keep your head on straight. That will take you a long way. Okay? This next one is from Salt Lake City. I was at a protest. This guy saw that I was taking photos in his direction. He came over and asked me some very pointed questions. And also there's another guy next to me that kind of stands up for me as well. So I didn't want you guys to get confused. You take my picture. I do. I'm on public property. Let me see your card to take pictures. I don't need a card and I want you to delete the photos of mine I didn't take a photo of. Let me see. I'm on public property and I see the photos you've taken. What are you here? Are you in support of it or are you enjoying it? I'm just ******* rise off. Okay. All right. What screams from this interaction is know your rights in this case. I knew I was on public property. I had every right to take photos of anything around me, including him. The more you can be clear and confident about that when somebody starts questioning you, the better. And also the guy next to me was helping me out too. I appreciate it, my friend. We eventually get him to calm down. Good communication paid off here. I was very calm. I was clear with him, we didn't go up because if we went up, he likely would have gone up and that's a bad direction. Things de escalated and didn't go any further than some tense energy and that's a good direction. Okay, that's it. Quick recap on aggressive and even tense interactions. Situational awareness, very important. Good communication, very important. Know your rights. Be calm. And always aim to de, escalate a situation. And I do recommend having the ability to defend yourself, because you might end up in a situation where you do have to. Hopefully not. It's rare, but it can happen. I found that most interactions are positive, some are awkward. But I've had a lot of friendly conversations with a lot of different people from different places who think different ways. And that's been an enriching experience for me. And I've gotten some lovely photos along the way. Okay, bye for now. Cheers. Next one we will be talking about the basics of composing photos on the street. See you there. 11. Bonus: A Coffee Shop Street Portrait: So we just got done inside this coffee shop here. It's called methodical coffee. It's a great coffee shop. And while we were sitting down having some coffee, one of the baristas who looked very interesting walked by. And I very quickly tried to put on the mice and told Christine to start recording because I wanted to get a portrait of him, and I was able to get a couple of portraits. Here's that. I think it is valuable. I think those interesting people like me, I thought you were very interesting. I was just wondering I could take a photo really quick. Okay. I wanted to get you in front of the staid. That's okay. All right. Cool man, I won't hold you up from your work, Tom. She's We're filming? Yeah. I'll be filming as well. Filming up. I'm doing a skill share course. Yeah. Okay. No, just like that man. Just like that. Feel good. I just like I like that stairway in the background. What was your name of the way? Okay. Okay. I'm James. Good to meet you. Thank you. Appreciate it, man. All right. You want to be pose or just stand there like that and whatever feels natural for you. And at first you can just kind of look off that way, like you don't have to look at the camera. Okay. And that might get you a look at it at some point. Sorry. I just got I got my settings all set up for outside walking down. We'll do that in a second 'cause I do like that. Yeah. I don't want to hold you up too much. All right. It's like quite dark. A nice wide shot. All right. In sight. See, let's see if I could get, maybe get some of these these things. A little bit tricky. See. All right. I'm wondering if I could the apron come down a little bit perhaps. I was just trying to get those things. If not, that's totally fine. Yeah. Yeah, that's perfect, man. Oh, yeah. I love this. Very good. Okay. And then, Yeah, you want to come down? All right, Colman, Thank you so much. All right. Go ahead. All right. Cool. And then cool. Let's you mind if I put you in front of this wall. That'll be the last one man got. Yeah. Got to put this wall to use. Let's see here. I'm sorry. Sorry. Sorry about that slide. Oh, okay. I like that. Oh, no, not the dirty dishes. All right. Let's see here. So I'm going to try to get that other wall out out of there if I can while still getting that lamp. Awesome. Thanks man. I appreciate it. Thank you. Do you have like, are you on line anywhere? I'd be happy to. Okay. I'd be happy to send you the photos. Let me get your name or either way or you can type me in either way. That's way his real name is. Okay. Pearl Bano. Let me just take a picture That that's better. Pearl Bano. Alright man. I'll send him over. Thank you so much man. I appreciate it. Good. Cobro. Excuse me. You mind if I take your photo? I'm a photographer. I take photos of interesting people. I think you guys are interesting. Are you Okay. You guys? Okay. Some people don't really respond at all. 12. Basics of Composing Photos: Hi friends. In this lesson we're going to be talking about the basics of composing photos on the street. We're going to be in a bit of a theoretical land. Might take a little bit of brain power. So I'd encourage you to be fueled with healthy fats and complex carbohydrates. So let's begin. First, I want to talk about objectivity and subjectivity. The techniques used to create an engaging street photo are the same techniques that are used to create an engaging art piece in any visual storytelling art form. But what matters is always the same, and that is compelling visuals and a compelling narrative. Many would say that art is entirely subjective. I would actually disagree. I would argue that art has subjective and objective dynamics at play. Babies, love, contrast. Those of us who can see color, find the color red. Objectively engaging, balance and symmetry are objectively pleasing to us. A point of light is objectively captivating to us. This is all wired in and this is why art works. It's not like we made all this stuff up and everybody decided to go along quite the contrary. But James, why do I like something in my friend doesn't. Good question. Art is complex and so are we. I'm not saying that we don't have preferences, I'm saying that those preferences are built on a foundation of objective wired in attractions that we have to the world around us. In the world of music. You have the genre of hardcore music. Now many people think that hardcore music is great. People like myself, there are other people who think that hardcore music is barely music at all. What's going on there? Well, I think we have personality differences happening. We have cultural differences happening. We also have the amount of exposure to that style at play. I found that there's a trend that the more you're exposed to a certain style of art, the more fond you will grow of that style and the more you'll understand that style. So that sounds a lot like subjectivity, right? Yes, it is subjectivity. However, that does not change the fact that there are objective dynamics of play, such as melody, rhythm, repetition, the surprise and delight that comes from improvisation. It just may not be packaged in the way that one person might prefer as a musician. When things get too repetitive, I get bored and I would prefer a bit more of that surprise and delight. So that creates a certain taste in music for me. But that doesn't mean that my tastes aren't built on objective responses within me to the dynamics that are at play in the music styles of any art for evolve and flow from one thing to the next over time. But they are always various soups of objective fundamentals. Okay, now back to street photography. When you're going out to shoot your photos and when you're editing your photos, you want to leverage these fundamentals. Now, does that mean that you can never take a photo with a Dutch angle and awkward color theory? Absolutely not. There's a place for that. By all means, take those photos. But you want to understand how all these dynamics affect the photo. When it comes to photography, the rules are simply there to help you understand the cause and effect dynamic that is at play. And when you are knowingly breaking the rules, you are simply leveraging those effects for a certain purpose. Sometimes you want a peaceful and balanced feeling photo. Sometimes you want a chaotic and uneasy feeling photo. What is important is knowing what you're communicating next. Subject and environment. One of the things you want to accomplish is a harmony between your subject and your environment. That establishes the subject as the subject, Environment as the environment. Now, this doesn't mean that a photo can't have two or three subjects or even a large group of subjects. But what it does mean is you want to establish a clear hierarchy. And you can do this by using things like light contrast, color, visual separation, symmetry and balance and so on. One of the biggest issues I see with mini street photos is the inability to establish a clear hierarchy. I think oftentimes the photographer is trying to do that. Perhaps they saw a subject, but they haven't quite learned how to translate that into a photo just yet. Also though sometimes the subject is the environment. This is great, but you're going to want to utilize your compositional fundamentals in order to organize your photo. And you're going to find yourself in a lot of cluttered environments. This is going to present certain challenges and you're going to have to make choices about what you want to leave in and what you want to cut out of your photo. Oftentimes you're going to find yourself still needing a focal point in order to build your photo around. Now let's talk about feel. The feel of your photo is influenced by all sorts of different things. For example, the time of day that you go out and type of light that it's giving you and the weather you know of course plays a role as well that will influence the feel of your photo greatly. If you go out in the morning and you have elegant and calming morning light, that will make your photo feel a lot different than if you have stark and dramatic nighttime light. Are you getting bold and aggressive mid day light, or are you getting moody and somber light from a cloudy day? All this light stuff impacts not only the hierarchy of your photos, but the feel as well. You can also greatly impact the feel of your photos. Through editing, you can edit your tones to be more warm and happy or cool, cold and depressing. These are just a couple of examples we will talk about editing more in the editing lesson. What I will say is that subject matter is a key player in how a photo feels. If you want a photo to feel cold and lonely, a good way to do that is to go to a quiet snowy town. You probably won't have to edit that photo that much to make it feel cold and lonely. But let's say you're in a busy city environment with a ton of people, you can still create a cold and lonely feeling photo, but it won't be the same. Another thing is that the cold and lonely snow town photo might not feel emotionally sad, the way that the busy city world with the emotionally disconnected person would be. I actually find the first one to be more pleasant and enjoyable. Something like an environment. I actually want to spend some time and I just feel sad for Mr. Lonely man. But anyway, enough of feeling cold and lonely, and depressed, and sad and like nothing's ever going to go. Right. That's about it for this lesson. Let's recap. Today we spoke about subjectivity and objectivity and art. We spoke about subject and environment and how to create harmony between the two. We spoke about feel and how to influence that. And the next lesson, we will be talking about some real street situations that I've been in and how we can turn a moment into a photo, utilizing the things we learn today. Okay, love you guys. Bye. 13. Composing Photos On The Street: Hi friends. In this one we're going to talk about composing photos on the street. We're going to take the theoretical concepts that we introduced in the previous lesson. We're going to run them through the filter of the street, which is complex and has a lot of dynamic Ace, is that a word, and variables. A lot of times what can happen is you can look at the theoretical world and go, okay, I understand these concepts, but when you take it out into that environment, you put your feet on the ground, you put your camera in your hands, you put your clothes on your body, which is important for being in public. It can be hard to figure out how to get those theories into your photo when running it through that filter. Because of the complexity, the variables. And today we're going to look at different situations that I've been in the resulting photos. So this is the first moment we're going to talk about today. This is the photo from that moment and this one does include some Go Pro footage, so I'm going to play it back in its entirety and then we're going to scrub through it in more detail. Before I begin with that play package, I'm going to show you guys where my subject is. That is my subject right over here. Not the guy in front. The guy in back with a suit. So let's play this back now. I get this coming. Bye bye. I'm setting up the shot. You can see that I've already composed the shot that I want. I said I was going to play it back in its entirety. I'll go ahead and stop it so you can see I've already composed the shot that I wanted and I'm letting him walk into frame. A lot of my photos are that way. Not all of them, but a lot of them. Yeah, it comes through. I take the photo and that's the situation. Now in terms of details, let's look at this guy here and with his stroller and his little girl. He is walking by and as soon as I took the photo, he was coming in from the right and he was passing in front of me. Now, this or a car. This is a common thing that's going to happen when you're trying to take a street photo. Something will move into frame and could make your photo not work at all. But it could also be a really awesome foreground element that comes in blurred. And they can help frame up your subject. But I've used things like that in the foreground quite a bit. I love doing it, but you can see how quickly things are moving around. I guess that's what I'm trying to illustrate here. A lot of times people will stop if they see that you're going to take a photo. They'll stop and they will wait for you to take your photo and then they'll move on through. But in this case, I'm not even sure if the guy saw me. He just came straight on through. Maybe he could tell that I was going to lower my camera, whatever. Either way, I don't expect people to stop for me, but a lot of times they will. So let's scrub back to the beginning of this clip and let's look at the environment. Generally speaking, over here we see various vehicles, various signs, buildings. Some of this may be clutter that you may not want in your shot. Maybe you do want it in your shot. For example, I did not want these very modern looking vehicles in my shot. And a lot of times I don't, unless they're kind of part of the scene in a way that's a bit more pleasing than being front and center. If we look over here, we see, you know, we got some sort of flag or something, not too much clutter going on here. Generally a pretty nice empty street, actually it's very nice, but the streets are going to contain all sorts of various things that may get in your way. So look at this. So we have three people. We have once again, Stroller Man. Here we have our subject, we have this guy, and then we have another person in the background tucked away over here. Those are all four people that could compete for the attention in the shot. That's how the street is. A lot of times when the perfect subject comes through, there's two or three other people around the perfect subject that you may not want in the shot, or there's a parking meter or a trash can, any number of things. Now here's the resulting photo. Now I want to take note of a couple of things. One is the simplicity of the shot as compared to how it looked before, right? There was a lot of things going on. We've turned this into a very simple, organized shot is symmetrical. There's some repetition with the pillars. We have our guy coming through, ending up right in the middle of those pillars. But a lot of the environment was cut out. That had a lot to do with my focal length, for example, where I'm pushed in more than if I was shooting with a wider angle like say a Go Pro ****. You can see how much of the environment that was able to cut out with that plus cropping of course. So focal length will help you out. Another thing that focal length will do is it will cause tighter focal length, I should say. It will cause your subject to appear more prominent and other elements as well, right? In this case, the pillars and the subject are both very prominent in this scene. And that's what we want, that's how I wanted it to turn out. In this case, I could have gone wider. I could have had the subject be less prominent, have the environment be more prominent. But all those decisions are going to change the level of prominence that different things are going to have in the photo. Also, the lighting. The lighting here, while it's rather stark, it's also quite pleasing. It's intense, it's engaging. And depending on the time of day, that's going to change how this photo is going to feel. Okay. Now let's move on to the next one. Well, first let's look at the photo. So this is the resulting photo. I love how this turned out. We have a fellow riding through with a yellow. I call it a triangle because that's the shape it makes. And I'm thinking, you know, geometrically for the photo. So the yellow triangle byte guy. But let's look at, let's look at the footage. So you see this one's got a cut in it. So you can see I'm walking up. It might be dehydrated and then, you know, it cuts to the guy coming through. This is because I pulled it from, you know, my video. So one thing that you can see, the guy is right there on the left here. He's on his way. He's going to hang a turn and he's going to start coming down this way. So I don't, I can't remember exactly when he caught my eye, but he sure did. This was a very quick situation. This is a bit opposite to the previous situation in the sense that it was not a sit and wait situation. It was, I am walking, keeping my eyes out for things. And a situation came about very quickly. Luckily, I was prepared for it. Settings are a big thing, right? Having your settings in order so that when this thing happens, you're prepared for it and you're prepared for the photo to accomplish, you know, whatever goals you want to accomplish with your photo. That's good, and I'll give you an example of how I do that in a second. Lay it back, comes through, boom, snap The shot. Very quick moment and you can see I followed him with the camera. Let's look at the moment of the photo taking edge. Probably about right here is. Let's look at what is in the scene. We can see we have some traffic cones in the back. We have a one of those modern vehicles. Again, various buildings all around. We have the foreground of the bike lane. What else? The building directly in the background. Some trees and such. And then we have our fellow coming through that environment. Now, the reason why I bring this up is because all of those things are going to matter. And how the photo turns out, everything from my focal length to, you know, where I'm standing to how I crop it, that makes a difference in how this photo is going to turn out, how the environment is going to look in the photo, how the subject is going to look in the photo. All of these things as our fellow is coming through here, look at that. I'm moving with him. Right? Quick tip. If you're moving with the subject before you take the photo to try to start tracking the subject as far back as possible. Because that will give your muscles time to lock into following the person in your shutter drag. In this case, the shutter drag is the background instead of the foreground. You know, because we could have the cyclist shutter dragging, I'm tracking with him. The further back I can lock onto him, the better I'm going to be able to track him, the better my muscles will be able to make sense of what's going on. In using motion blur, I was able to take what could be unpleasing clutter and turn it into a really interesting background or at least a background that's not so prominent. Then we have our guy, nice and sharp, and he's right in the center of the frame. There's no other subjects really competing with him. I think it's even really cool that I captured the bike path, marking some interesting contexts that helps you understand that we're on a bike path and it all turned out really well. And then this pop of yellow, you know, I remember I was talking about colors, how we respond to colors. This pop of yellow is very strong. It helps us immediately gravitate towards that point in the photo. And then it makes everything else in the photo organize around that point. It's an organizing force in the photo. I'm really happy with how this turned out. I love this photo and it was something that just came so quickly. You know, having your settings in order, having my shutter speed not at a 4000th of a second was good here. Lately, I've been shooting at a lot slower shutter speeds because I've been trying to introduce even some pretty dramatic shutter drags into my shots. Well, in this case, it really paid off because, you know, in the past, if I would have had it at 2000, 4,000 to the second. That background would have been nice and sharp. I mean, it might have been a little out of focus, but it would have been nice and sharp in the motion blur department. And, you know, I think this is a more pleasing effect according to my goals. So let's move on to the next photo. Okay, next we have this photo, which I absolutely love. We have a group of fellows walking by and then we have some eyes. So we'll get to that in a second. Let's play the footage which is quite hazy. Looks like it has a strong one of those mist filters on it. But photo anyway, you can see what's going on. You know, we're walking through the subway just to give you a sense for the environment. That's my wife on the left, so little were still walking but walking walk. I got quite busy. Subway, good times. Okay. So this is the situation we can see if we look closely that these are our eyes. This is our scene. This square here, I'm going to guess I was shooting around 50 millimeters or so. I can't remember exactly. We have our subjects coming in from the left, I'm sorry, from the right here. Directions are hard left here. And this is really cool, because what happens is we end up with a convergence of perfect serendipity. And we also have this person in the middle who could have easily been in the way, but they weren't. And this person in the front here, this person goes by, they come by and then, bam, right about there is where I get the shot. And it's just, I mean, I didn't make this happen. I was just there when it happened, you know. And I was ready and my camera was ready. So we have the subjects walking through, We have both of them on their phones, which I just is just beautiful. Everything in this photo just works together so well. We have these two eyes, one for each person. And I think this really demonstrates a sense of focus. What are we focusing on? That's what I really like about the narrative that we have here. This is a good example of a strong narrative in a street photo. I always love when people have somebody walking by and there's some sort of street art or like an advertisement, and it matches with the subject somehow. That's always fun. We have some patterns in the foreground made up of this fence. Some people might not like this. I think it really adds to the photo. I think it's kind of a fun bit of intrigue. Sometimes you want it, sometimes you don't. In this case, I think it looks really cool and it adds to it. You can still see the eyes. They're still, you know, prominent enough. You can still see the people. When you're out taking photos on the street, the goal is not to take a perfect photo. The goal is to take a compelling photo. And working in some of those imperfections can actually make for a more unique photo. A photo with more character. New York is full of character that is made up of imperfections, right? So anyway, that's that one. You can see that once again, having a readiness for the moment when things come together, literally. In this case, things come together is a big deal. We're missing these moments all the time whenever we're not taking photos, but when we're taking photos, keeping your eyes out, keeping your head on a swivel, and having your camera ready for that moment is good. But with all that said, that's about it for this one. I hope you found it helpful. I hope it will help you run these theoretical concepts of compositional thoughtfulness through the filter of the street to the other side where you make beautiful photos. One of the big things I want you to take away from everything that we've spoken about today is always be thinking about how you can cut out pleasing slices out of your environment and how you can be prepared for serendipity. Those were two major themes we saw in all of these photos. Whether I'm sitting and waiting and composing my shot, and paying attention to everything that I don't want in the shot, and trying to keep it out and waiting for somebody to come in. Whether I'm not waiting for somebody to come in, I'm just looking for that composition or something's happening very quickly and my camera was ready for that moment. By the way, my camera is not ready a lot of times too. Those are important things to remember. Join us on the next one where we talk about editing photos. We're going to have a little light room session. I think it'll be fun. See you then. 14. Editing Your Photos: Hi friends. Welcome to my office. Welcome to my light room, Welcome to my lab. In this lesson, we're going to be editing some photos together. I am going to first show you the tools that you will find in light room and what they do. These are tools that you will find in most photo editing apps, although light room has a lot of them. And we're going to then spend some time editing some photos roughly and see what we can learn. Now, I did want to mention, this is my method for editing photos. Everybody has their own. I would encourage you to compare and contrast. Take what you love. Store it in your heart. Never let it fade away. Take what you don't love. Put it in your hand. Throw it in the bale of hay. So this photo was taken in New York City. This is one of my favorite photos I've ever taken in New York City. It's an older photo, was taken with an older camera, non D 600 full frame DSLR. It had a beefy shutter sound. I love that camera, but yeah, I love this photo. Very happy with it. I don't actually know how I captured. I think I stood on one of the sort of medians that they have there on Broad Street. Really cool shot. I mean, I'm just amazing. So anyway, let's go to the tools. If we go to the right hand side first, let's go all the way to the top and then we'll look at the histogram. So the histogram is primarily a reference tool, although you can click and move it around. It's primarily a reference tool that allows you to see where the tones in your photo are located. So you can see we have the blacks all the way on the left if we click and if we move through, we have shadows, exposure highlights, and whites all the way on the right. If you take the exposure slider, push it, you can see that all those tones start migrating and then they funnel into the whites. And then you end up with what looks like a quarter pipe and you have a nuclear fallout photo. This is a very helpful tool for helping you understand what's happening in your photo. Now if we go down, we have a black and white button. And you can see that that changes the photo of black and white also changes the histogram, gets rid of the color tones there. If we click color again, those color tones, come back. We have these tools, let's touch on these really quick. We have the crop tool, and this just allows you to crop things, although in this one, no crop needed. That does not happen all the time. Then we go to the healing. This will allow you to actually remove certain things from your photos. A very helpful tool we have the red eye correction. This is primarily for if you have a flash, you can add a mask for all sorts of fun masks that you can do for subject sky background object. You can use a brush and dark, darken selectively areas of the photo or lighten them, change various things. Now let's go down to the white balance. The white balance is how your camera, I'm pointing at, my camera decides to render the colors that it sees in the world. Its goal is accuracy. It wants to create an accurate looking photo. If we push the slider, the temperature slider to the left, here, we see that we have a cooler photo. We push it to the right, we have a warmer photo. We're manipulating the white balance. If we take the tent, we push it to the left, we get a more green photo. We push to the right, we get a more magenta photo. We can change the global exposure. The photo if we go to contrast the dark points darker, the light points lighter all at once, and you end up with a more punchy looking image, as I like to call it. Or you can go backwards with it and make a faded image. You can control the highlights. You can control the shadows. You can control the whites. You can control the blacks. The whites being the brightest point of the image, and the blacks being the darkest points of the image. And you can also hit the Reset button. Then there is, if we go down to the presence area, Sounds nice, doesn't it? We first the texture slider. Now this is an interesting tool. It sort of defines your photo more and crunches it up a little bit more, and you can kind of see in the church there that it really does those things. Now, I don't use the texture slider all that much, I don't really love the effect that it creates. But we also have the clarity slider which does a similar thing but differently. I will use the clarity affair a bit and once again really defines your photo, crunches it up a little bit, really can liven it up and you can really go crazy with the clarity. And you know, I do like using it. I'll push it up maybe ten or so if I want to crunch things up. But a lot of times I'll actually soften up the photo because I do like a good film look. If you take the texture push all the way back, you get like a weird watercolor situation, pull the clarity back, you end up with that. There's the haze button which is designed to ride your photo of haze generally. If I have haze in my photo, I'm pretty happy about it. Vibrance and saturation, they do. The same thing, but a little bit differently. It just looks a little bit different. If we go down to the tone curve, this is my favorite tool. It offers a tremendous amount of control over your image. You can make points all throughout the histogram. See inside the square is a histogram. We're in the blue channel right now. Somehow we ended up in the blue, we're in the blue channel and if you pull it down, you see yellow on the bottom there. We're actually yellow A fying the highlights in the image. And then if we go all the way down to the bottom, we can actually pull this up and make the shadows blue or the blacks actually all the way down to the bottom making those blue. We can do this and accentuate that. You can see. We can make points all over if we wanted to, we can move things around. Like I said, tremendous amount of control. You actually take the whites and crush those down and make those yellow. But you can also just go into the black and white tone curve and manipulate the contrast of the image as well. You can fade. Let's reset. So you can see what's going on here. So if I make a point here, point here, fade the blacks and end up with a faded film. Look pretty cool. You can crush the highlights and get what I call milky highlights. So you have red, green, and blue. You can do some really fun stuff there, love the tone curves. Then we have the HSL sliders. Hsl stands for Hue Saturation, and illuminates the hue of your color. You can manipulate and let me find one that's really prominent in the images. We have some blues. You can do some very wacky things with this. You're basically changing the colors in your image to different colors. So the blue is now turned purple pretty wild. You can actually subtly manipulate these and create some really lovely effects in your photos. Then we have the saturation sliders. And once again, we're manipulating individual colors in the photo. So it's very direct, very selective. So we can take the reds and then saturate the reds more. We can desaturate the reds completely oranges, yellows, luminant. So you can move that around and change things. Let me find one once again, that's actually, there you go, see. So you can do some wacky stuff with that. I like to manipulate the hue and make my skies a little bit more teal, my blues a little bit more teal, very cool. Then you have the color grading panel. And this is just another way to manipulate the colors in your photo in a different way than you would get with the curves. For example, in the mid tones here, you could push this up and get some warm mid tones if you want, you could take the highlights and make them blue. You can take the shadows and make them green if you want. You can make them red. Do some really fun stuff. You can get very aggressive with it if you wanted to. Some extra sliders about sharpening, you can, you can add sharpness to your photo. You can you have noise reduction. Get rid of some of the noise that you might find, particularly in darker photos that are, where the ISO has been pushed up and it's very noisy. Then we can go down to **** corrections and check this out, push this button, boom. Look at how much that changed things. Particularly cheaper lenses will have distortion and vignetting. Wide angle **** is a great example of this, where around the edges you can end up with some really wacky looking bent, you know, light poles and things like that. That's **** distortion. But it happens subtly with all sorts of different lenses. You just see it most pronounced in wide angle lenses. Lenses will also vignette. You can see that the **** was vignetting, but when I turned this on, it vignetted the image, kind of fixed that distortion, made the lines a little bit more straighter, and it's a very helpful tool. You can also, you have some manual settings, you can do some extra things as well. This will change, it's the transform panel. You can click this button and it'll level out your image. The great thing about this image is it's pretty straight. So you can level it so the lines are straight up and down. There's an auto button, it'll create a bit of a different effect, you guide it. I barely use that one. Full will create a pretty dramatic leveling situation a lot of times, although in this one, once again it's very straight, so it's not doing too much. Great ways to level out your photo. You can also do it manually, but this is more of an automatic way to do this. And you can also come on, you're really trying to get abstract and expressionistic here You're, you just want people to feel stuff. There you go. Fantastic. Might as well hit export right now. Post crop vignetting under the effects panel, you can create dreams. Or you can create a really harsh vignette, you can manipulate it. So really fun little vignette tool there that I don't use often. We have grain, You can add some film grain to your photos. I add that to almost all of mine. Subtle, but it can really, really butter things up. You have calibration. Now, this is another way that your camera is attempting to create, or attempting to render the colors in the world. And what this panel allows you to do is change how that works. But what I like to do is actually use it creatively, and you can manipulate these and really get some fun effects. Unfortunately, this is not really showing up here, you can see right here. So I mean, when I push this really hard, look, I mean, it's actually kind of cool what you end up with. And so a lot of times this will be some extra sauce that I'll put on my photo. I mean, this is pretty aggressive but you get what I'm saying. So those are the primary tools you're going to be working with and of course some more than others. And they are very, very helpful if you're trying to edit a photo. Now, with all that said, let's put a quick edit on this photo, shall we? The first thing I'm going to do is enable profile corrections. We're going to get a nice baseline and then I'm going to go into the contrast and just add a little bit of that just to pinch what I'm doing, changes for every photo, but it's very feel focused really. I'm sure for other editors it's not as feel focused for me, it's just like what needs to happen next for this photo. I'm going to click in the tone curves in the blue channel, in the shadows make point. I'm going to make point in the highlights. I'm going to pull it down. We're going to create what I like to call a blue and yellow look. So we're going to pull it down just a little bit and warm up those highlights. Then I'm going to pull up on the blacks, and you can see the shadows are getting a little bit blue. I'm going to go down to the grain and add it. We're going to, I like 2020 is nice. Now what I could do is could I could get into the HSL sliders and really start to tweak the individual channels luminus and such, and dial down certain tones. Icon just did a great job with tones, so I don't think I need to worry too much. I like the reds. Everything looks nice. So we'll leave this photo where it is. Like I said, a rough edit. Let's say we wanted to crop it though, right? We could go here to the crop tool and I click 16 by nine, that selects 16 by nine ratio. And then I could, you know, go right here. You should be seeing my keystrokes as well. Boom. There we go. I mean, we got a movie. We got a movie. Maybe we'd come down a little bit with it. Look at that. Beautiful here we have a fellow with some pink hair. Now we're going to straighten this one out. Let's see if the level button will do the trick for us. There we go. That's exactly what we needed. Now you can see that he's right in the middle of the arch. Luckily, I don't have to edit him to be in the middle of the arch. But do we want to crop in tight? This is where we can make decisions about how much of the environment we want to leave in. I think this looks really cool this way, although we could really go either way with it. So we'll just go this way. And then let's say we want to make this a really, really punchy situation, let's get some grain on it already. Then I want to go to the color grading once more and look at that. You can see that the blue is bouncing off of that pink color beautifully. And this photo is basically done. This looks great. Maybe we can brighten up the skin a little bit in illuminates and HSL sliders. Yeah, I mean, like really grungy looking photo, but we could use the clarity and maybe come against that a little bit and just see what that does. Like, I kind of like softening up the skin a little bit there. That looks great. Just a little, 10% 1% things. Okay with all of that said, that's it for this one. I want you guys to go edit one to three photos and share them with us. And please feel free to share your thoughts as well or any questions you may have. I will see you in the next lesson. 15. Conclusion: Hi friends, Congratulations you made it. You can now street photography boy. Oh boy. We've been on a journey. Multiple videos of listening to me talk, which just sounds wonderful. I have learned a lot from teaching this thing, organizing this experience for you guys. I hope that you guys have learned a lot as well and that you enjoyed it along the way. I want to thank you guys for being a part of this. I want to thank you for giving me that opportunity to grow myself through the process of teaching. Now I want to talk about the class project once again, now that we're wrapping this thing up, remember I want five photo, five street photos from you guys. Five in terms of what I would like to see with these photos, each photo must involve a street scene. It must utilize compositional thoughtfulness. And it must establish a clear and defined subject. Remember, that can be multiple subjects as well. And if you share a photo that's like one of those, everybody in the shot kind of photos. Like, you know, I don't know, we're pointing down on a group of people. And there are times when, you know, it doesn't have to be like a single subject. If I see that you're utilizing compositional thoughtfulness, then that's great. And also, I want you guys to challenge yourself according to your street photography goals. As you do this, I hope to see that coming through in terms of types of photos I want to see. I would love to see candids of strangers. I would love to see street portraits also of strangers. Sorry, you can't use your friends. You can do that later. Cityscapes are great urban exploration involving people or not involving people. Animals, I suppose can be involved as well. Those are great, and aerials are also welcome. I also want to reiterate the interaction guidelines for this class. Remember to be kind. Critiques and discussions are absolutely encouraged. But please be kind. Don't be a mean person and discuss in terms of, I was going to say the wrong thing. Discuss in terms of cause and effect instead of right and wrong. Discuss in terms of right and wrong. You'd be like this. I'm confused. Now let's look back over what we've learned. We're going to summarize, obviously, we're not going to just do all the lessons over again. The exposure triangle. We learned how the exposure triangle operates, how it affects your resulting photos, and how important it is to understand what's happening there. We learned how to choose your gear and how character and ergonomics are two important words to consider when choosing your gear. We learned about the legality and ethics of street photography. Very important things for developing confidence on the street and making sure that we're doing the right things. We learned about street photography mindsets, how to hit the street with a beneficial collection of mindsets. We learned about how to find the action on the streets very important because you can't take photos of people if you can't find the people. We learned how to interact with people in both a candid and portrait format in two different lessons, and I hope that was helpful for you guys. I think we were really getting into some good meat by that point. We learned how to better compose your photos. Very important because you can have photos of people. But if they're not composed well, you're going to end up with a photo of a person that may not be as visually compelling as something that is where you have an interesting story. Because you have an interesting subject paired with interesting visuals through thoughtful compositional awareness. And then we learned about editing photos and how that can change things. Okay guys, as we move along, things can get complicated, things can get difficult, there can be challenges, key takeaways moving forward. Enjoy yourself. Always enjoy yourself out there. Remember, this is supposed to be fun. This is supposed to be something where we're growing through challenging ourself. But it's also perfectly fine just to go out there and have a relaxing photo walk. Either way you go put the fun in the middle. You know what I mean? Always evolve. Always be working on growing yourself and making sure that a year from now you're in a better place than you are now. Because you've allowed yourself to think in different ways, operate in different ways. Try new things and good stuff like that. Think about what you want to accomplish moving forward, what your goals are, and also stay inspired. Stay inspired in terms of you, try that again by interacting with types of content that keep you inspired. Or go to new places that keep you inspired. Interact with people who keep you inspired. These will help keep you out of those uninspired ruts. And then think about what you want to accomplish. Focus on your goals. With all that said, I will be in the discussion section. Please feel free to ask any questions. I would be more than happy to engage with you guys over there. Help you with any struggles you may be having. Also, if you want to find me elsewhere on the internet. James Red on Youtube. James at James Red on Twitter and Instagram. And please feel free to engage with me on there. Please, please please feel inspired to leave a review of this class. If you've had a good experience or if you've had a bad experience, you're welcome to do that as well. If you've had a good experience, if you can let other people know who are checking out this class that you did, that would be very helpful. But if it was terrible, let them know that as well so that they'll stay away from it. I appreciate you guys so much. Thank you so much for watching. I hope that this has been helpful for you and I will see you guys around. Love you happy photo taking.