14. Positioning
Street Photography
Where do you stand? I’m not talking about your position on the issues of the day. I’m talking about where you position yourself when you are taking a photograph. In street photography, where you stand matters.
While walking the streets, we can sometimes see a potential subject from some distance away. The challenge is to get there, get the camera ready, and get the shot before the opportunity disappears. Another strategy is to scan your immediate surroundings while walking until something catches your attention. If you stop and study where that element sits in relation to everything else in your field of view, you can see if there is a potential for a photograph before you lift up your camera.
The next step is to study the scene through the viewfinder or on the screen. By shifting slightly to the left or right, squatting down, or leaning forward or back just a little, you can fine-tune the visual distance between things to create a composition worth capturing.
In the first photograph below, I came across the silhouettes of the traffic lights and a road sign against a flat blue sky and a bright red facade. I framed the view to allow a bit of space around the silhouettes and waited for something to fill in the middle ground. A bus passed and I managed to capture a shot that included the yellow circle and rear wheel.
The orange cone and road markings caught my attention in the second scene. When I noticed a man running along the road, I quickly crouched down to frame the elements and focused on the cone. Fortunately, he was wearing a light-coloured shirt, which stood out against the parking garage exit.
While walking through a light industrial part of town on a clear day, I saw three small, wispy clouds against the blue sky. I also noticed that, if I stood in the right spot, the utility pole next to me was flanked by two others further away. Looking through the viewfinder, these verticals, together with the horizontal lines on the road and the striped pattern of the roof of the building across the street, created an interesting composition. I focused on the pole beside me and held my camera still, keeping the three poles visibly apart, as I waited for someone to enter the scene from the right. The three clouds were slowly moving and changing shape but, fortunately, they remained in the frame until a man in shorts completed the composition in the third photograph.
Download the photos
The photos in this post are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 New Zealand (CC BY 3.0 NZ) license (required attribution: Mark McGuire). You can download the full-resolution original images from here.
What’s next?
I’ve recently been photographing shadows, reflections, and umbrellas in the rain. I plan to publish a post about one of these topics, or something else, next weekend. You can receive the next post by email by subscribing below.
What do you think?
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Thanks for this lesson in composition and color (and patience!).