Street Photography Research

Street photography is defined as "photography conducted for art or enquiry that features unmediated chance encounters and random incidents within public places".

"The decisive moment" was a phrase coined by Henri Cartier-Bresson, one of the earliest practitioners of street photographers. “The decisive moment” is the same as the “Kodak moment” where everything comes together in a perfect moment, and you hit the shutter. So essentially it is capturing the photo with the perfect timing.

When you’re out shooting in the streets, don’t just take one photograph. Take a ton of shots (I recommend 10-30 photos if possible). 

In street photography, you can create a strong image by juxtaposing elements in your frame. Juxtaposition is essentially a fancy word for contrast. To create a strong juxtaposition shot, you can either start off by looking for an interesting background (let’s say a billboard of a man looking happy) and waiting for someone who looks really happy to enter the frame.

Not all street photography needs to be super emotional. Some street photographs are purely visual images– that appeal to our sense of geometry, composition, and composition. These images are generally shot in good light with nice lights and shadows, have strong diagonal lines, leading lines, curves, and shapes of interest.

Some of the best street photographs focus on the details, not the whole picture. When you are shooting on the streets, you can focus on small details. This means rather than taking a full-body shot of someone on the streets, focus on their hands, their face, their earrings, their hands, their feet, or anything else they are holding.