Tip #2: Be patient and explore with your eyes as well as your other senses.
Shakespeare once said: “Find a stage and the actors will appear”. We can apply this to street photography. Often, we walk passed something, stop, take a shot with our camera, and move on to the next thing. But the plasticity of our brain, working with our eyes and the visual cortex is an amazing thing. Our brain and visual cortex may pick up on a detail that is interesting, but we are not aware what exactly it was, that piqued that interest. So, we stop, bring the camera up, take a shot and move on.
But that rarely results in a good photograph. How often do we come home, look through our pictures and think: Why on EARTH did I take that picture? So be patient. If your eye catches “something”, then pause for a few seconds and try and figure out what exactly it was. Because the brain works the way it does, it may even ‘teleport’ you to a slightly different vantagepoint where a ‘scene’ actually evolves from being a snapshot to a photograph. It may be the placement of a person against a different (less busy) background. It may be the ‘framing’ of something within something else… it could be any number of things. But if we are not patient, and allow all our senses work, but only determine a ‘scene’ looking with our eyes, we might miss it altogether. And it might not even be something visual, it may be a smell, a sound, or some other sense, that made us stop. But if we do not try and determine what it was, then how are we even going to photograph it.
I am sure you have heard the term “The Decisive Moment”, which is the title of a fantastic book by Henri Cartier-Bresson, one of the most important photobooks of the 20th century. If you haven’t read it – I strongly suggest that you do. It’s a LONG discussion to get into here, but basically the book is about being prepared for what CAN happen, and then have the patience for it TO happen, being ready to press the shutter, JUST at the right moment.
© Henri Cartier-Bresson + Magnum Photos
Continue reading this article go to Tip #3: Activate your imaginary telephoto vision, or go back to the introduction.