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Anon Anon
Ok anon....I was just assigned a photo project in my B&W class. The subject is street photography. Basically anything in the street or anything that I come across.

Give me some good ideas of where to start or some related pics.

Pic Related
>> Anonymous
always look for good light
>> Anonymous
walk around on a street somewhere.
>> Anonymous
take pictures....on a street!
>> Anonymous
study some of the photos here:

http://www.flickr.com/groups/onthestreet/pool/
>> ususaly Anonymous
an assignment for on the street, would be good if done on a street like environment, i would reccomend bringing your new nicon digital camera into your local "inner city" walk around in bright pastels with your camera around your neck, also it helps to have your wallet stuffed with money, and wave it around while you walk the street
>> Anonymous
>>87009
Totally.

Or if you'd rather not get killed, go to the artsy/gay district of the city, or your town's main street. They usually look pretty nice, and might be dressed up for Halloween.

What kind of place are you dealing with?
>> Anonymous
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Public place + Camera + Ninja = Win

But seriously, advice:
-meter for the general light once, then adjust your aperture and speed at the same rate, adjusting for major differences in light.
-Snap. Street is about seeing and reacting, not taking fucking forever to compose.
-Don't be a dick, but don't be a pussy either.
-Get close.
-Use a prime, 50mm or wider.
>> Anonymous
my method is just to bring a shit ton of batteries and sd cards, and shoot pretty much everything i see.

half turn out like complete shit, but some turn out unexpectedly epic because of the circumstances.

at least, this is what i do when i am on vacation at a scenic spot.
>> 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.
>> Anonymous
>>87129
God I hope that was sarcasm...
>> Anonymous
>>87134
I don't mean disregard composition, quite the opposite. I mean that photogs need to learn to compose fast AND well.
>> Anonymous
>>87134
Addendum: I just realized what it looks like I was saying, and I wholeheartedly agree with you. Do not take snapshots, do not just go out and fill up a CF card/tons of film.
think about your shots, compose them mentally before they happen, just be quick about the actual motion of taking.
>> Anonymous
>>87129
And there you have it, the symptom of the digital age. Composure means shit: just shoot a million shots, one or two will turn out acceptable and then fix everything on photoshop.
>> Anonymous
srsly, if you bother to study photography (read a book or two) and you know your camera's features then it should reallly never come as a surprise when you look at your negatives/jpegs
>> Anonymous
>>87144
embrace the advances of technology. being able to shoot more also lets you get more keepers. what if you could compose nice pictures and be able to take billions of photos? yeah. if you use digital then use it and learn it! fuck yeah
>> Anonymous
>>87147
go back to school
>> Anonymous
i shoot 4x5 film sheets. fuck you guys with your 24 and 36 exposures per roll.
>> Anonymous
>>87150
I sage shitty threads and pretentious wankers
>> Anonymous
>>87144

Uhm, this happened well before the digital age. A great number of professional photographers shooting 35mm SLRs use this very technique. Sometimes they even have assistants standing by to hand them a freshly loaded camera while replacing the film in the finished one.

Granted that it's a lot cheaper to do this in the digital age, but it's nothing new.
>> Anonymous
The photograph is more important than the photographer's sense of superiority.

Get the best picture possible, period.
>> Anonymous
http://dgrin.smugmug.com/gallery/1077234
>> Anonymous
The best thing to do is take a picture of a niggercock and turn it in.
>> Anonymous
>>87168
<----
/b/ is that way
>> Anonymous
>>87155
Yes, but one doesn't get the best picture possible by shooting randomly. Only an infinite amount of time will have a monkey turn out Shakespeare; one only has "1/125th" to get a great photograph, if it's something candid.

Like someone said, shoot fast and well. The aforementioned Winogrand would just walk around and shoot several rolls a day; he shot so much (and was so lazy about processing) he died 300,000 frames developed but not looked at or edited and 2,500 rolls of film not even developed. He still composed every shot.

Cartier-Bresson, on the other hand, (surprisingly) shot only a few hundred rolls in the three years he spent covering India.

Whatever works, yes. Shooting a bunch of bad shots and getting one tolerable one by luck does not work. If you set up a camera on a street corner, and set it on auto to take a frame every ten seconds, in a year or two you might get something decent. But the artistic heart wouldn't be there: the photographer is an artist, not an processor controlling program mode and autofocus on a camera.
>> elf_man !fBgo7jDjms
>>87172
In other words, we need to stop chimping.
>> Anonymous
>>87172and was so lazy about processing

Didn't he wait for a couple of years before he developed stuff?
>> Anonymous
>>87265
Yes, partially as a technique, to come at it clear of whatever mood he got when shooting in, and partially because he was just plain ass lazy sometimes about developing, and so got behind even his delayed schedule. Or at least that's how I understand it.
>> Anonymous
>>87280

wow, i'm duly impressed that someone knew about winogrand's 2500 undeveloped rolls of film. where'd you read about that? a.d. coleman?
>> Anonymous
>>87283
Never heard of A.D. Coleman. Read it a bunch of places. Checked the numbers to make sure I had them right just before posting with Wikipedia.
>> Anonyfag of Borneo !bHymOqU5YY
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Shutter priority mode.

Camera-Specific Properties:Equipment MakeCanonCamera ModelCanon EOS 400D DIGITALPhotographerunknownMaximum Lens Aperturef/5.6Image-Specific Properties:Horizontal Resolution240 dpiVertical Resolution240 dpiImage Created2007:06:18 01:59:25Exposure Time1/200 secF-Numberf/5.6Exposure ProgramNormal ProgramISO Speed Rating400Lens Aperturef/5.6Exposure Bias0 EVMetering ModePartialFlashNo Flash, CompulsoryFocal Length200.00 mmRenderingNormalExposure ModeAutoWhite BalanceAutoScene Capture TypeStandard
>> Anonymous
>>87284

ah. a.d. coleman is a snarky new york photo critic who insisted that the 2500 rolls of film don't mean anything, since winogrand didn't even care enough to develop them. he argued that szarkowski (MoMA curator) could construe any one out of a thousand pusthumous identities for winogrand: the winogrand who loved taking pictures of trees, the winogrand who loved taxis, et al. Coleman makes a pretty good argument for critical evaluation based only on the artist's own portfolio, 25 or so photos redacted from a pool of thousands.

worth a read, just because coleman is awesome, and because it made me think about which photos of my own to select, and of the inherent flaw of, say, the flickr photostream.
>> heavyweather !4AIf7oXcbA
Look at lots and lots of photo books.

Henri Cartier-Bresson, Gary Winogrand, Elliott Erwitt, Robert Doisneau, Werner Bischof, Alex Webb, James Nachtwey, Abbas... the list goes on. Just look at great stuff, get inspired, and go out there.
>> Anonymous
>>87289
I wouldn't say they don't mean anything, or that Winogrand didn't care enough per se... I've heard his plan was at some point to move to a cabin in the middle of the woods and spend his days doing whatever, landscape probably, with a view camera he had already bought and developing that backlog. Of course, he died of cancer before he ever got around to doing that.

I think the best analogy would be to the writer Jack Kerouac. Kerouac published twenty-two major prose works, and always talked about being so spontaneous and not revising and everything. An examination of Kerouac's unpublished papers and so on reveals that he revised quite a bit, in the same way looking at Winogrand's negatives show that he would try a few different compositions of a subject, instead of his reputation for just snapping. And similarly with failed experiments in their respective mediums, notes and test shots, etc. While the thing being analyzed must be the actual work Kerouac and Winogrand put out there, looking at what they left behind privately can help us understand and better analyze their actual body of work.

But yeah, posthumously edited work can't really count as someone's own work, even if the editor is someone as close as Szarkowski was to Winogrand. Nietzsche's sister tried to make him out to be a raving anti-Semite in her mold, despite that he actively mocked anti-Semitism and praised Jewish culture in his writings.
>> ac !!VPzQAxYPAMA
So I've often wondered, what happened to those undeveloped rolls of Winogrand's? Did someone develop them for him? Was there any win on them?
>> Anonymous
>>87359

I think some of them were developed and exhibited, which I think made Garry roll inhis grave.
>> Anonymous
not all streets are made of paved road