Ideas that Help Improve Your Street Photography

Street Photography is a way to see more deeply into the moment, to fall in love with the fleeting things that normally pass us by.

When you do street photography, you are mostly looking at people and architecture. There isn’t a strong, pin-point definition of street photography. It really is about how you and your camera, and your reaction to the street. It’s about what you make out of it.

Ideas that Help Improve Your Street Photography

Photographers look at mundane experiences with a deeper imagination. We bypass the surface of life that rushes through the passages, and find glints and reflections that form into something more meaningful than a simple work-a-day life.

“Photography is a way of feeling, of touching, of loving. What you have caught on film is captured forever… It remembers little things, long after you have forgotten everything.”

Aaron Siskind

Below is a video that I made, it covers a few salient points about street photography.

What it was like decades ago, I cover the names of a couple of famous street photographers to look up and study.

And how street photography has changed because the streets have changed.

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Practise and you will get better at street photography

Intention in photography is about knowing what you want at the end of a street photography session. So, you go out and look for it. It’s when we develop a strong sense of intention that we also practise our abilities to take good photos. We are pushing ourselves a little more each time.

There’s always something new on the street. Street photography offers a lot of challenges that demand spontaneous reactions. So we do, we react. But if we can learn to act, to be proactive, then somehow we can feel as if we become part of the situations that we encounter. I believe this leads to better photography, as if we have melded into the street, and come home with a little part of the street inside ourselves.

It’s never only about the camera, it’s a combination of you connecting with what’s going on around you, and allowing your creative mind to take the reins. Let the horse gallop.

If you can walk and look, and absorb the world around you as you go, you’ll begin to see like a photographer.

You can also go out with a strong intention of finding motifs to photograph.

Both these, strong intentions and absorbing what you see, opens the mind to the imagination. Like a child playing.

Sometimes, I’ll head out with a small camera, and be on the lookout for a certain colour. The colour could pop up in many places, clothing, building facades, and lines of traffic waiting at the lights.

When you have a simple idea of what you want, a colour, a particular shape or form that can be seen in architecture, you’ll begin to see it all around — sometimes, in the oddest of places.