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Street photography.
To me, this medium is about capturing the hidden beauty of everyday life. It's a magical feeling to walk around a city for a day and return with beautiful, artistic fragments of its life and people. Yet it's still a relatively niche art form, so I'm writing this entry to explain some stuff.
Street photography has always been a unique genre of photography. In my opinion, it's the least reliant photographic style on technical correctness and technology. From when it first started becoming what it is today back in the 20s and 30s, images could stand on their own legs regardless of the state of camera technology.
I first discovered street photography in my sophomore year of high school, and over the next few years I'd use the streets of Boston as my playground, learning and practicing how to really "see" the city. It took time, but by wandering those same streets over and over again - many times returning without even a single good photograph - I grew more comfortable with some established techniques and started developing my own style. Of course, with my other activities and interests in high school, I'd often fall in and out of love and motivation with my art. The result of those on-and-off years is my portfolio Characters of Boston, which compiles my best street portraits from around Boston. I am still, to this day, very proud of this collection.
But where am I going with this?
Well, with the release of this blog post, I have now officially published my new portfolio!
Characters of Boston was the product of two years of shooting here and there, and features exclusively street portraiture, which is just one aspect of street photography as a whole. In contrast, these past 3 months abroad have been a whirlwind of passion and inspiration, and I've been the most consistent I've ever been with my art. Being in a new place almost every single day and constantly discovering new things; there's no better way to force myself to get out and shoot.
European Fragments is my favorite thing I've ever created, and I'm incredibly proud of it. But I've also learned a whole lot while creating it, so I figured I'd use this blog post to give a background on my philosophy and artistic process.
One of many images from European Fragments
First of all, what is art without inspiration? My biggest inspirations in this space include photographers like Ovidiu Selaru, Phil Penman, Peter Turnley, and Mark Fearnley, just to name a few. All of them are full-time street photographers, which means that they spend their LIVES doing what I've just done for only 3 months. I guess you could say this was my time to experiment and pretend to be someone like them, to see how I liked it.
Honestly, these past 3 months have given me so much more respect than I already had for these photographers. You see, in a perfect world the images from my portfolio would be spread out, evenly distributed among the cities I visited. But motivation is a fickle thing. There were some cities, which seem random now - most notably Berlin, Paris, Rimini, and Zagreb - where I felt super inspired. I don't really know any other way to explain it, or why it happened this way, but I was super motivated in those places and ended up with a lot of good photos.
Other times, entire cities passed by without creating a single good image. This was a bad feeling, and I regret not capitalizing as much on my time in those places, but eventually I learned it was just how I worked. Yet these professional street photographers that I so admire are able to consistently create at a much higher level than I am, day in and day out. Nobody's perfect, but this process has taught me that there's still a LONG way to go with this art form. They say comparison is the thief of joy, and damn sometimes when I see the new photos these people are posting, I get in my own head. They consistently see the world in a more creative way than I do, and some of their images carry such soul and story that I've really yet to achieve in my work so far. But that doesn't mean I'm not proud of the images in this portfolio. I just know I have more in me, and I can create bigger and better things in the future.
Even though street photography can be shot on any camera kit - technical specs and traditional photography rules don't matter that much - I thought it would be interesting if I explained, completely transparently, about my creative process from the past 3 months.
I shot all of my photos on the Sony A6700, equipped with the Sigma 18-50mm f/2.8 lens, and I edited exclusively on Adobe Lightroom. When I'm out in the street I shoot in color, but then depending on the image I will shift it to black and white in post. Black and white eliminates some of the distraction that color offers, but sometimes that distraction is relevant and interesting, so it really depends picture to picture.
I keep all of my photos on a Sandisk hard drive, and I also post the final ones on my Instagram. I use Instagram mostly as a way to keep track and categorize my own images, I don't care about the numbers. I've developed this system where I narrow down my images from a day or from a city to the 20 best ones (the maximum allowed on an Instagram post). This has obviously varied across my trip, but overall it's a good system to easily keep track of all my images in my head, because they can quickly become overwhelming without organization. Oh, and I use an app called Whitagram to add white borders (a digital matte, per say) to these final images before posting them.
Over the past 3 months, I created 38 unique posts. From these, I determined that I have exactly 665 unique "Instagram-worthy" photos. Now, those are already cut down from the thousands of decent images I saved, and I don't even want to know what fraction those occupy, compared to the ones I've thrown out. Safe to say, there are a lot of images.
For this portfolio, I decided to pick my 100 favorite photographs. Ones that I believe have the most soul, tell the best story, or just honestly look the coolest. It was difficult to cut down to just 100, and I had to exclude many images that I still feel very fond of, but this portfolio is the most proud of anything I've ever created, and I truly poured my heart into it. It is the definitive product of the whirlwind that was the past 3 months.
One of many images from European Fragments
If you'll allow me to ramble some more, I thought I'd cover some basic techniques that I look out for when I'm in a city. Obviously, the most important rule of the genre is that there aren't any rules, but having some frameworks in mind keeps you from always wandering aimlessly.
Silhouettes / framing. Framing the simple form of person within a pre-chosen composition is one of the best ways to create a beautiful image. Making use of harsh contrast, often in black and white to eliminate color noise, it's a fun method to employ because it's fully down to the photographer's compositional skills. With other forms of street photography there's room for spontaneity and unexpectedness - humans are unpredictable - but this method just relies on silhouettes, making it a lot more straightforward. Most of these compositions would feel very empty without that silhouette, but when someone perfectly walks into the frame and you know you got the shot, it's an unbeatable feeling.
Example of silhouette / framing
Slow shutter speed. By reducing the speed in which the camera shutter snaps, it allows for more motion blur in the image. When you combine this with strategic camera movements, it can create some incredibly artistic and abstract compositions. This is probably my favorite technique, and one that I haven't really employed much before this trip. Some examples of this are panning, when you track a moving object so it remains in focus while the background blurs, or the camera spin, where you rotate the camera body so the edges of the frame take on a spinning blur. Even just randomly shaking the camera quickly back and forth can sometimes create an interesting double-exposure or ghostlike effect. This is the most hit-or-miss technique on this list, but when it hits it can create really interesting images.
Example of a camera spin
Portraiture. This technique only really worked when I was feeling super motivated and confident about my work; it takes a certain courage to approach strangers asking to take their picture. Most of my street photography captures moments which would be gone by the time I'd walked up and asked the person(s) for their permission. Street portraiture, however, works best when I've directly asked the subject to take their portrait. The close up nature of this technique makes the photograph more intimate, especially when I can strike up a conversation with the subject and develop a slight connection. Honestly, I wish I did more of this abroad. My work in Boston was heavily focused on this technique, and so I slightly stepped away from it in Europe. Still, I've met some very interesting portrait subjects over the past 3 months!
Example of street portraiture
Other smaller techniques. Color matching; normally, most of my photography ends up in black and white, but when I'm outside I'm always looking out for people wearing a similar color as an object in the city. This similarity can create some very interesting color compositions. Another technique is reflections; shooting through windows and puddles can make an image feel surreal when done right, and some of the best conditions for street photography happen when the sun comes out right after a rain storm.
Example of color matching
Now, I say all of this, but European Fragments is kind of an amalgamation of all sorts of things. Not all of these techniques are even very present, they're just some things I tend to think about while walking. The true magic of street photography is how you can go out into a city with absolutely zero intent, and come back with masterpieces. Sometimes the best images come from photos you took and disregarded in a single second!
I'm well aware that I am not very good. The thing that separates a good image from a great image is a captivating story; truly great images have a soul that really makes the viewer FEEL something. While I'm proud of the work I've done, and my knowledge of composition and techniques and cities across Europe has increased a ton, I don't know if I can say that I even got close to creating a great image. I realize I have a long way to go if I want to come close to the professionals I admire; some people spend their entire lifetimes taking photos and are lucky to even get a single truly great image. But this is a start, and while I don't really see myself making a career out of street photography, I don't think I'll ever stop doing it.
Traveling Europe, it's easy to take the same photos of landmarks that thousands of other people have taken. Street photography lets me experience a city in a different way, and I take pride in knowing that nobody will ever truly recreate the images I've made, because humans are always different and constantly changing.
One of many images from European Fragments
That's about it. I may have rambled a bit in this entry, but I had a lot I wanted to get down, and I hope it was insightful.
Go check out European Fragments now!
Mark
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