Hacking Photography - one Picture at a time
Have you ever asked a complete stranger to take their photo? Have you ever felt connected with someone you’ve never seen before? It can be strange, right? New York-based photographer Richard Renaldi focuses his project Touching Strangers around these situations.
Richard finds random strangers in the streets and poses them like they’re family, friends or even partners. The result is an incredible series of photos which shows the connection we can form with others even though we’ve just met.
There are certainly several ways to find models for your photography project. But Los Angeles-based photographers Neil Kremer and Cory Johnson (KremerJohnson) decided to use Craigslist, which turned out to be more than successful. Their simple Craigslist ad has attracted hundreds of responses and turned into a pretty big project that’s still ongoing. It captures people of “all shapes, races, genders and sizes” and shows the true beauty that lies in diversity.
The joy of Photographing on the street comes from close and engaging photos. Displaying the human nature and emotions in a way that the audience can relive these moments requires the photographer to be close and engaging as well. Unfortunately for a lot of us, it is not easy to stand out from the masses and overcome artificial social boundaries. Causing an irrational fear of photographing in public and making the live as a street photographer very hard. In the following article I will describe the sources of this obstruction that is limiting our full capability.
How many times has it happened that you travel and manage to photograph only a bunch of other people’s heads, mobile phones and selfie sticks? Thomas Heaton came in a situation like this, and he became every photographer’s hero when he decided to do something about it.
My name is Matt Palace and I intend to photograph 1,200 pilgrims. “1200 Pilgrims” is a personal project carried out with the intention of photographing 1,200 Pilgrims on the Camino de Santiago in Northern Spain. Individuals from around the world walked this 800km trail over the course of 30 days, as a spiritual retreat.
The aim of this experiment was to discover if I, as an amateur photographer, could improve my workflow. I was curious to know whether the use of a professional flash head could influence the quality of my pictures compared to my previous work.
Street photography can be understandably a little intimidating for beginners. You don’t want to be the photographer that goes up to people and sticks a lens in their faces, but equally, you don’t want to always be using a massively long lens on the other side of the street, FBI style.
In this video, photographer Gary Gough gives some excellent tips to help you begin exploring street photography. For me, it’s a genre I’ve typically shied away from as it embodies a couple of elements that I really find difficult. Namely, patience, having less control over the outcome, and photographing strangers. But it’s time to be brave! Here are Gary’s tips.
I’m not a professional, but I take my street photography seriously. Because I enjoy it so much, I’ve invested a lot of time learning the craft and practicing it. I’m not great, but I’m better than I was.
This article is about the things I’ve learnt or experienced over the last 10 years. When I started out I read stuff like this and it helped me a lot. The following is what I would have told myself if I could go back in time to when I got started.
It might take you half an hour to read the whole article, but if you’ve only a couple of minutes, read the nutshell version.
When you think of street photography, a super-telephoto lens probably isn’t the first thing that comes to mind. But Evan Ranft thought: why not? He teamed up with Chris House to test out a Sony FE 200-600mm f/5.6-6.3 G OSS lens in the street. While it still wouldn’t be his first choice for street photography, it does have its perks, and Evan shares his impressions and some photos in this interesting video.
There’s no way around it, the new Sigma 105mm f/1.4 Art lens is freakishly huge. Compared to the Nikon 105mm f/1.4E lens released a couple of years ago, it just looks ridiculous. The Sigma is substantially bigger and weighs about 70% more than the Nikon. It even weighs more than my Nikon 70-200mm f/2.8 zoom.
But how does it actually feel to shoot? And how good are the images? I’ve had the opportunity to play with one over the last few days, so this post goes through some of my initial thoughts, and what I think of the lens so far. If you want the short version, though, I love it and hated having to give it back.
Many of us are trying to find our “style” in our photography.
1. Photography style
But what exactly is “style”?
For me, “style” in photography is about consistency of subject-matter and consistency of aesthetic (how the photo looks).
For example, if you want to build a definite “style” in your photography — seek to work on a photo project, where you focus on a specific subject-matter. You can focus on a specific person (personal documentary), you can focus on a certain city (your own hometown), or you can focus on a certain social issue.
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