What Street Photography is, and why I love it.

What is Street Photography? It is not taking photos of the street if that’s what you are thinking!

For me, it is about capturing the little things that happens on the streets, (see?) which happen for maybe a split second and then disappearing forever – never before seen again.

This notion is what strives the Street Photographer, (S.P.) to capture these precious moments and share them back with the public.

Caspar Claasen, Amsterdam.

Some people may see it being creepy, even bordering the voyeurism line and I understand their point of view – however these photographs are capturing people in the public streets.

The majority of street photography will be in no way rude, wrong, or anything that is being frowned upon in today’s society.

Rather it celebrates youthfulness, happiness, humour, juxtaposition & all the other big English words we learnt in high school :)

Braving the Night Rain - Danny Santos II

Street photography is raw, (pun unintentional, I swear!) – which is why I love it. There is no staging, no faking or posing, there is little-to-no post-processing, everything is normal.

The modern day S.P. may be considered a historian – in this commercialised world, maybe in 100 years time, street photography will be the source for the future to look back on what life was like in the 21st century.

Anyone can do street photography, with any camera – you do not need to learn how to Photoshop, (thank goodness) – you just need to carry along 2 cameras; something to capture the image, and also the most important camera of all - your eyes!

You don’t need a good camera, heck I shoot with an old $30 film camera because it doesn’t look threatening (more later).

My Street Photography Camera

Street photography requires patience, waiting for the perfect image – some days you get that one perfect image if you are lucky, some days you can hit the jackpot and get two, (haha).

Matt Stuart

Matt Stuart

All in all, I just wanted to introduce the background of Street Photography and why I like to shoot it for fun :)

Leave your thoughts below, and thanks for reading.

 

Cheers,

Matthew