Street Photography

a tutorial and exhibit from Philip Greenspun

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"Stare. It is the way to educate your eye, and more. Stare, pry, listen eavesdrop. Die knowing something. You are not here long."

Walker Evans (in a draft text to accompany the hidden camera subway photographs)

My favorite thing about street photography

What I like best about street photography is that it is possible to look in more than one place at once.

In this photo inside Greenwich Village's French Roast, I was trying to get a picture of the tuned-out New Media exec with the women conversing in the background. I guess I got the photo that I wanted, but there is also a dog fight going on outside. I'm pretty sure that I didn't see that in the viewfinder or in real life.

[Note the careful use of on-camera flash and ambient exposure so that the lighting is evenly balanced on subjects both inside and outside the restaurant.]

French Roast, 6th Avenue and 11th, Manhattan 1995.

	note the black dog in the corner
	note the photographer in the upper right corner
	I'm not even sure what to say about this, but I can guarantee you that the scene (Venice Beach, from my California series) didn't seem quite this varied in real life.

Volume, Volume, Volume

Garry Winogrand is famous for having exposed three rolls of Tri-X on the streets of New York City every day for his entire adult life. That's 100 pictures a day, 36,500 a year, a million every 30 years. Winogrand died in 1984 leaving more than 2500 rolls of film exposed but undeveloped, 6500 rolls developed but not proofed, and 3000 rolls proofed but not examined (a total of a third of a million unedited exposures).

This is the kind of dedication that you need to bring to a street photography project if you hope to achieve greatness.

Technique

The classic technique for street photography consists of fitting a wide (20mm) or moderately wide-angle (35mm) lens to a camera, loading high-speed film (ISO 400), and pre-focusing the lens. Pre-focusing? How do you know how far away your subject will be. It turns out that it doesn't really matter. Wide angle lenses have good depth of field. If your subject is 10 feet away and the lens is set for 12 feet, you'd probably need to enlarge to 20x30" before noticing the error (assuming a typical aperture). This is why the high-speed film is important. Given a fixed shutter speed, the faster the film the smaller the aperture. The smaller the aperture, the less critical it is to focus precisely. The extreme case of this is a pinhole camera, for which there is no need to focus at all.

Street photographers traditionally will set the lens at its hyperfocal distance. This distance depends on the lens focal length and the aperture but the basic idea is that it is the closest distance setting for which subjects at infinity are still acceptably sharp. With fast film and a sunny day, you will probably be able to expose at f/16. With a 35mm lens focussed to, say, 9 feet, subjects between 4.5 feet and infinity will be acceptably sharp (where "acceptable" means "if the person viewing the final photograph doesn't stick his eyes right up against it").

A modern alternative is to use a camera with a very high-performance autofocus system and a zoom lens. The Canon EOS bodies coupled with the instant-focusing ring ultrasonic motor Canon lenses (about half of the EOS lenses use these motors) are an example of what can work. Paradoxically I find that I was able to work as quickly and get as high a yield of good images (these are from Guatemala) with the Mamiya 7 rangefinder camera:

Whether you go modern or traditional, many of your pictures will be ruined due to poor focus, subject motion, hasty composition, etc. So don't feel bad if you only get one great picture out of 1000. If you're using a digital camera, you won't even have to lose sleep over how much film and processing you're wasting.

Gallery

Miami, 1995, part of my Costa Rica story

Canon EOS-5, 35-350 lens, program autoexposure, Fuji Super G + ISO 400 neg film

This photo illustrates the advantages of the Canon 35-350L lens (a $2000 photojournalist's toy). I took it from the passenger seat of a car stopped at a red light. The rain lead to highly saturated colors. Canon EOS AF

Sheepdogs on 14th Street. Manhattan 1995.

a few from Sweden...

One of many Swedes using a cell-phone in Stockholm

and Germany...

Front yard of Linderhof. Where Bavaria's King Ludwig II lived.

and Ireland..

and Israel (Ireland's neighbor in the UN, separating Israel from Iraq)..

China is one of the world's best places for street photography because (a) there are so many people, (b) so much happens out in the open. Here are a few images from the photo.net guide to China:

Japan is a good place to see extremes, either people practicing ancient ways or people overwhelmed by modernity. Here are some images from the photo.net guide to Japan:

Street photography in New York City

Text and images copyright Philip Greenspun.

philg@mit.edu