Street photography can be defined (at least by Google AI) as:
“… a genre of photography that captures candid, unposed moments of everyday life in public spaces. It’s characterised by its focus on spontaneous encounters, random incidents, and the human condition in urban environments. While often associated with city streets, street photography can be practised anywhere people gather, including parks, public transportation, and even indoor spaces like cafés or malls. “
It is also a genre that I have only attempted in a limited manner in my photography. I have taken city streets and town architecture, but I have for the most part avoided street photography containing people as the main subject. Like many people, I have never felt at ease or comfortable getting up close to a stranger in the street and taking a photograph. It has always felt to me as though, completely legal, it can seem intrusive and in my own city centre, also probably downright suicidal.
I have always felt that street photography featuring people is something I should attempt as I have many books on the subject and love looking at the work of several photographers who specialise in it. I had purchased my Fuji X100F with the express intention of starting to do street and urban shoots, but have never used it for that purpose.
Over the last few months, however, I have become more convinced that I should give it a go. I have watched YouTube videos on the subject and how to go about it whilst avoiding possible confrontation. One of the best videos is by Jeff Ascough on his and his photographer wife’s Walk Like Alice YouTube channel. Please take the time to go to these links. The Ascoughs’ work is really inspiring.
The video by Jeff that made me think I could possibly attempt street photography is the one below in which he discusses how he takes his photographs by “shooting from the hip”
After watching the video a few times, I felt that this was a method I could use to alleviate the trepidation of confronting people and taking their picture in an urban scene. I decided that the smallest of my cameras, the X100F with its 23mm F/2.0 lens, would be the most inobtrusive (although it is a silver model) on the street, and so I used it on my first attempt.
All my cameras are set up with manual back-button focus, and I usually use aperture priority; however, for this, I set the shutter speed to 1/500 sec, the aperture to f/8.0 and left the ISO on auto. The focus was set to 2 metres for zone focus, and the Fuji DOF bar was set to pixel. This gave me a DOF of about a metre on either side of 2 metres. Thus prepared, I walked through the fairly busy streets for about an hour, the camera resting on my chest and activating the silent shutter with my right thumb. No one looked at me as I walked around, and it felt quite liberating.
Once home, however, I was not happy with the results. It seems that I had been subconsciously raising the camera slightly with my left hand as I shot the photos, and I was also accidentally rotating the focusing ring on the lens as I did so. The result was subjects in dark shadows, and they were also not sharp. I was really disappointed and initially thought that all this was too difficult and not worth the effort. But, after a few days, I changed my mind and decided to look at how I can alleviate the issues that I found.
In the next post, I will describe how I changed the setup of the X100F and how my second street shoot went.
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