The third F in Street Photography
I was tempted to drop the actual F-bomb in the title, but I thought it might be a bit much. Thing is, F**k! really is the third F and it sounds awfully similar to luck. Mind you, luck is a big part of this technique! But is it a technique?
What it boils down to is this: you are merrily walking around with your camera in hand and suddenly a perfect shot materialises in front of you. You readily raise the camera to your eye while uttering under your breath a word similar to “duck”. You smoothly fire off a frame (or three) of the perfect scene before it disappears in a matter of seconds. You keep on walking while waiting for you heartbeat to slow down again, with a smug look on your face because you know you got the shot and you were ready.
Now we have to break down the process that you perfected in years of practice with your 10.000 hours and more.
Merrily walking around
You’re not just poodling along minding your own business and thinking of what message to send next to your Tinder match! You are fully concentrating, in the zone, looking for the next shot. You are waiting for the serendipitous to happen, you are seeing what is happening on the street around you and keenly aware of what might develop. This is fundamental if you want to be able to nail that shot: actually, to even get it on camera at all before it’s gone!
Camera in hand
Another fundamental element. If your camera is not at the ready you won’t have the time to get the shot. It can be in hand as in physically held in your greedy clutches ready to release that shutter. It can be on a strap around your neck or shoulder, but still with your paws on it ready to lift it to your eagle eye. Switched on! Not asleep in power saving mode unless your practice drills included automatically tapping that shutter button to wake the camera as soon as you start raising it to your mug. Nothing is more frustrating than pressing that shutter button and having the camera sleepily stretch and yawn before being ready to shoot - and missing the shot completely! That tends to make you revert to a mantra only known to advanced swearing meditation masters: f**kety f**kety f**kety f**k f**k f**k! (Remember to put a strong emphasis on each of the last three words for a strong punctuation of the spirit-lifting part of the mantra. A slight sharp nod on those punctuations can help, putting a progressively stronger emphasis on each of the three ducks).
Another thing that only comes with practice and concentration: camera settings ready for the scene. It seems elementary, you just let the camera handle it and you’re set. Or not? Thing is, the camera is as dumb as a doorknob. It doesn’t know if the subject is backlit, still, moving, too bright. Hell, it doesn’t even know which your subject is!
Let’s start with exposure settings. First of all, unless you want a sense of movement in your scene, you better have a minimum shutter speed (SS) of 1/500th of a second. I often have it at 1/250th but at that SS we are at the edge of blurriness with the subject and I have to be really careful. How do you get the right SS? Manual settings, or shutter priority (S or Tv, depends on the camera brand), or minimum SS set in the auto-ISO settings - know your camera! After that, the actual exposure: it will be a combination of ISO speed and aperture at this point. But the aperture also controls the DOF, and you normally want to have the biggest DOF possible. This will depend on your sensor size and pixel density as well, due to circle of confusion (CoC) and diffraction limits - but that is for another article. The moral, again, is that you have to know your camera! On a full frame sensor we are generally talking about F8, it can be F5.6 on APS-C, and so on. Thing is, your aperture should possibly be set to a fixed value to ensure your results will be as expected, with enough DOF. This leaves you with ISO. This is where auto-ISO can be handy, but you have to be ready to change your exposure compensation if needed. It will be coming down to your preference: I often shoot in aperture priority with auto-ISO and fixed minimum SS at 1/250th or 1/500th of a second. If the lighting is difficult I will be on fully manual mode. Don’t get caught with the wrong settings if you are on fully manual! A completely wrong exposure will draw you back to the mantra.
Then comes focusing. And let’s not think about eye detection or face detection autofocus (AF) modes: they can be amazing, but what if you have five people in the shot? Which one to focus and expose on? What if someone close to the camera turns towards it while you’re focusing, and becomes the pin-sharp wrong subject in the scene? Eye/face detection or not, unless you have the latest and greatest camera model, AF still takes time. You can use zone-focusing, which can be the fastest way: you don’t even think about where to focus because your subject will be in the depth of field (DOF) already. Or you prefocus on the pavement or somewhere at roughly the same distance to the subject while raising the camera (hello Fred!) - but again, this requires practice! If you have to focus in real time on the subject most likely you have to focus and reframe, losing quite some time in the fleeting scene developing in front of you, given that you are using single point AF. If you use multi-point AF you never know what the camera will decide on. Maybe that sign in the background, giving you a smoothly blurred main subject. And the mantra comes to you again…
Uttering the fudge
That is essential to the right mindset required for the best results.
Timing is important: don’t delay the duck, drop it as soon as you realise what’s happening. It will trigger the fast reaction you honed in all your thousands of hours of practice and allow you to get the best results. Most importantly, use the fudge by itself, as a single word. Do not add an “Oh” before it. “Oh funk” doesn’t have the same incisiveness as the single syllable “futz!”. The double syllable with a pause in-between will draw the trigger on in time, delaying your response. For the same reason, use a single “f”, don’t lengthen it in a drawn “ffffffflunk!”, it will slow down the raising of the camera to your peepers.
The volume is important as well, as are the intonation and timbre of voice. Never drop it so loud that you can be heard from your surroundings: the reaction to such a primal alarm call alerting the herd might alter the scene. But it should still be uttered and not just a thought. Hearing it yourself will trigger you into action more readily and effectively. The intonation should be a low, urgent and solid one and not sung, lilted or, worse, ending in a higher tone like a question. “Funk?” will leave you wondering you you should really take that shot, wasting precious time. Finally, the timbre of your voice should be resolute, decisive, almost gruff. Do not use a childish or croaky voice or, heaven forbid, a falsetto! Be authoritative!
Fire off a shot or three
There are many Street Photographers with an attitude claiming that the decisive moment is captured only with a single shot with the perfect timing, hailing the divinity of Henri Cartier-Bresson as the epitome of single-shot mastery. But then if you really know what you’re talking about you realise that even HCB shot many frames of the same scene, and there are contact sheets to prove it. Of course HCB was also a fudge master. See this shot, it was a single frame. Although I guess he might have uttered a word with a sound more akin to “herd”, using his native French language keyword “m**de!”. But he certainly did use it correctly, with perfect timing and intonation!
Fact is, Street Photography is 99.9% about failure, as Alex Webb says, and he’s right. This means that shooting a single frame of the scene lowers even more your chances of getting the gesture, expression, interaction or micro-composition that will make a good picture great.
Moral: get off your high horse and shoot a few frames of that scene! You might have gotten it right the first time (you really have to be good with the timing, so time that first shot with great care!), but chances are that you might get an even better one a half a second later! I don’t believe in using burst mode and shooting 20 images every time, but burst mode is definitely useful at times in short three-four frame groupings. I use single-shot mode and fire off repeatedly as needed. Usually I end up with 2 or 3 frames, it depends. I tend to shoot at least twice unless I want to get that stride right for example: in such case it makes no sense to shoot twice because one will always be wrong. Then you just get that one right.
Keep on walking
You move on only if the scene has exhausted itself, and the shot is gone. If the scene is still developing, you keep on working it. Keep on shooting.
Keep in mind that if you see something happening, even if you missed it, sometimes it might happen again: a child climbing a fence, jumping or dancing, a person stretching or yawning, a laugh, an interaction. With experience or good observational skills you will be often able to gauge that possibility and wait it out.
Otherwise do just that: keep on walking!
Wait for the heartbeat to slow down
When you see the scene coming together you get into a fight-or-flight response mechanism. Your adrenaline gets squeezed in your bloodstream, your heartbeat speeds up, your senses sharpen, your eyesight gets clearer, your reflexes get faster, you swear like a pro. That’s when you use the fudge to its maximum potential and get the best shot. After that you just get back to a normal alert state, ready for the next time you need to pounce.
A smug look on your face
Street Photography is difficult because so many shots are plain rubbish. Some are just ok. Few are quite nice. Rarely you get the good ones. When you do, you somehow know it even without having to chimp on your camera. The smug look on your face will be there wether you want it or not. But wait until you left the scene before before fist-pumping!
The smug look won’t be there when you know you haven’t got anything.
When you know that the scene was perfect and you somehow fudged it up, you will be reciting your mantra with mastery.
You were ready
That is the “technique” part of the third F. It’s not a single technique, it’s the sum of everything you practiced so much to achieve mastery in your craft. That’s what I talk about in my article Practice in Photography, this is a craft and it requires dedication to get better at it. Like every other skill, you need to hone it and work hard to become good at it. The “F**k!” Technique requires luck, but remember the old saying: “The more I practice, the luckier I get”. Not only you should hone your skills, you have to be out there and shoot. The scene will develop with or without you. The only way to shoot it is to be in front of it. It will be down to luck to be there exactly when it happens, but your lucky moments will multiply dramatically the more hours you spend on the street.
The camera is ready, you are concentrating and paying attention, you know how to frame effectively, you know what the background is to better enhance the subject, you have have your uttering of the keyword down to a T (or to an F?). You are ready. That’s when you get the shot.
This concludes the series about the three Fs in Street Photography according to Matt Stuart. Thanks for reading, and look out for more technique articles on Street Photography here on this blog!
Please let me know your thoughts in the comments.