Like many of you, I was raised with the idea that when you take portraits you say things like; “Chin up, eyes forward, and look into the camera.” For many years when shooting adults this seemed to work just fine, then I went to Korea for a year. For some strange reason it seems a whole lot harder to coach a person, if you don’t speak the same language. Sure I went through the motions; gesturing with my hands, and speaking louder and slower. Don’t ask me why Americans think louder and slower will magically make others understand a language they never spoke before. But eventually; I stopped trying to change the subject, and realized I was the foreigner here. I had to change how I was shooting.

I shot many informal portraits while in Korea, by just waiting and watching. I learned how to be invisible. When you become invisible, the subject forgets that you are there and starts interacting with his or her surroundings again. To this day, the best smiles I have ever captured on film or digital media were of those who either didn’t know or forgot that I was there.

A friend once stated, “So in a way you were forced to become a street photographer.” Up to that point; I had never thought of myself as a street photographer, so I started trying to define what makes a good street photographer. Street photography is often described as a series of shared moments, either with others or with the environment.

Read more about Interesting Street Photography. A distinguishing feature of good street photography is finding the extraordinary in ordinary places. Much of the great photography of the Time/Life era was street photography. It is to a certain degree, Zen photography at its best. You do not focus on the technical side of photography, you focus on life. You wait for that brief moment in time, and then you capture it on film or digital media for time and all eternity.

More than anything else, street photography is a state of mind. Now that I have defined it, I realize much of my wedding photography was shot in street photography style. Yes, I always brought a list of traditional shots. Things like: Bride and Groom Kissing, Bride and Groom cutting the cake, Bride throwing the Bouquet were my traditional photography shots. But what got my work remembered were my “Street shots”.

Photographs of: little bride’s maids smelling flowers, mother whispering wisdom in the brides ear, or the Big Mac the groom had hidden under his chair in the reception line were prime examples of “Street Photography.”

Besides the obvious benefit of capturing memories for your viewer, becoming invisible and shooting from the heart is much less stressful for the photographer. You have not announced your intentions to the world, so all that remains is for your client to be pleasantly surprised. You do not worry about getting it “Just Right”, ideally you don’t worry at all, and you simply focus on the moment. Pay attention to details of what’s happening around you. What you are looking for, is what most everybody else has missed. You are saving memories that others may not have had, unless you had been there.

Most types of photography can be easily defined by their subjects. A wedding photographer takes pictures of weddings. A portrait photographer poses someone and takes their picture. The nature photographer covers a wide area, but it is easy to categorize.

Street photography is difficult to define because it can encompass just about any subject.

If I were to ask you to name a few famous street photographers, you might pick, Garry Winnograd, Henri Cartier-Bresson, or maybe Robert Frank. But if I asked you to define street photography – that would be more difficult. You might say that street photography is candid pictures of strangers on the street. That might be a good start, but it doesn’t really describe street photography.

To start with, street photography doesn’t need to be done on “the street.” And it doesn’t need to be pictures of strangers. In fact, it doesn’t even need to be pictures of people, though it usually is. Although there are common subjects for street photography, it is not so much about the subject as it is the style of the photograph. I can easily imagine an astronaut orbiting the earth, using a street photography style.

Just as any object or scene can be painted with in a cubist style, just about any subject can be photographed in street-photography style. I say almost any subject, because the one thing that all street photos have in common are human beings, or human artifacts: things that were made by human beings. So what are the characteristics of this style which can be separated from the subjects of the image.

The most common and famous property of street-photography is the idea of capturing “the decisive moment.” The most well-known street moment may be the blurred image of a man trying to jump a puddle at the railway station by Cartier-Bresson. A moment sooner and you have the guy standing, looking at the large puddle. A moment later, and the man has fallen into the puddle, or cleared it somehow. You don’t really know. But capturing the moment, even if it is important, isn’t everything.

Suppose that photograph were taken with a long modern lens, and the figure was frozen at 1/8000th of a second in mid-air, and the background and foreground were blurred because the depth-of-field with a long lens is very narrow. Well, it might look very much that moment when a pitcher releases the ball in an important game. The foreground and background are blurred. Even the closest part of the pitching mound is out of focus. Can that be considered a street shot.

No. Why not? It’s the decisive moment alright – but without context – it isn’t street photography.

Since we’re imagining shots, let’s imagine that you are sitting in the dugout with a normal or wide angle lens, and you hear footsteps on top of the dugout. You wonder what is going on, and at the same time you prepare your camera, and the pitcher is taking his wind up in the background, and just as he let’s go of the ball, a naked streaker jumps from the top of the dugout onto the field. And you have snapped just as the figure was in mid-air, and the ball was coming to the plate, and the pitcher was finishing his follow-through. That’s a street shot. No street. No buildings. But you have caught two moments, and pretty much everything is in focus, and you can look at the picture and just be amazed. The viewer is as surprised as you were – though you had some idea that something was about to happen.

It’s that sort of moment, or juxtaposition of ideas, that street photographers are fascinated by. If you had a lot of money, you could dream up this still shot, and rent out the stadium and the team, and recreate this shot exactly as described – but that would not be street photography. And so long as nobody told about how the shot was set up and planned, it would be considered a great street shot. If everyone found out that they were duped, it might still be considered a great photograph – but not a great street shot.

The moment is not enough. To play by the rules, the shot really does need to be unplanned. It also needs to allow the eye to wander around and make it’s own conclusions about the meaning of the photograph. If street photography were a musical form – it might be jazz. It might be rock and roll. The style of music would have a measure of improvisation.

Street Photography is not the same as documentary photography

If you send our imaginary street photographer to photograph the President giving at a press conference, they return with pictures of the other photographers at the photo op. Journalistic images are a dime a dozen. Their style is about curiosity. They need find be surprised in order to press the shutter. And it’s not all based on juxtaposition, or the actual event. Maybe they find that three photographers look the same, and that’s enough to click the shutter, if they are arranged properly.

The street photographer is a perpetual tourist. They may never leave their own town, but as they walk around, they can see things that the rest of the world is oblivious to. So I say again – it isn’t the things they photograph nor is it always about the decisive moment.

I knew a street photographer who became fascinated by the different ways that people hailed a cab in New York. For two years, whenever he saw someone hail a cab, he tried to find a new angle, a new way of shooting this most ordinary of urban moments. One day, after years of keeping an eye out for people hailing cabs, he glimpsed, a young girl with crutches waiting to get into the cab. This might have been just another shot, but as he got closer to take the shot, he saw an old man with crutches was getting out of the cab. You look at the image, and think – what a stroke of luck to find this coincidence but he took years of maintaining this obsession to make something from the idea. And other times you just walk out of the house and are greeted with this sort of coincidental image.

Another common aspect of street photography that makes it different from other forms of photography, is that it is usually not sponsored. (In rare instances the photographer is given a grant to do this shooting, but as I say, this is rare). Just as nature photographers are haunted by their own desire to capture a mountain that is special or the mating habits of some bird species, the street photographer is driven to extract juxtapositions, or similarities, or unusual moments from the swirl of urban life.