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Anonymous
>>87054
I'll post some more advice later, but I just can't let this slip.
>-Snap. Street is about seeing and reacting, not taking fucking forever to compose. Different photographers have and had different ways of doing it, but all great street photographers have been careful about their composition.
Winogrand, supposed ultra-snapper, did do it fast, but he was meticulous about composing every shot and getting it right. He was just really fast at doing it, and so everybody thought he was some mad, magical snapshooter. All those tilts? Not sloppiness, but an active decision (right or wrong) on his part. He would fiddle with the camera and try vertical, horizontal, and tilt compositions, at lightning speed.
Cartier-Bresson was big on reacting to the scene, but he always maintained that "geometry," in other words, good composition, was the key element of a great photograph.
James Nachtwey, while not a "street photographer," does the same sort of work, except in warzones and not on the literal street. If you watch him work, he works the scene over, taking a bunch of shots, but adjusting his composition (quickly) for each one.
David Alan Harvey hasn't weighed in that I've encountered on composition directly, but he does emphasize reacting- over time, getting in with a subject and shooting it well. Reactions, but not "quick" ones.
I bought into the whole "snapshot" thing, too, for a time, and that was what I got: snapshots. Then with reflection, I realized that the best shots I got were the ones where I worked the scene, a bit like the Nachtwey style I'm describing above. I tend to get my best shots either walking repeatedly around a crowded area, or just plopping myself in one spot and shooting. Everyone's different, but composition is crucial. Just getting out and shooting randomly is liberating, but it seldom produces great shots, just like freewrites are liberating for writers, but Dostoevsky didn't make Karamazov haphazardly.
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