Streetwise
A reader shares his street photo skills
By trade, I am a lawyer residing in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Six years ago, peering dimly into the future and realizing I was going to start winding down my law practice, I made a commitment to photography. It rapidly became a habit first of all, then a passion. Soon after that, it transformed into an obsession! I always travel with one of my cameras and some of my gear, even if I am travelling for work. My greatest interest is street photography, but I think some of these shots leach into architecture territory. I shot all of my submitted images on a D5100, which I had from 2012-2017, but I recently upgraded to the Nikon D7500.
I feel most of my favourite street photography is based on luck. For example, my first image was taken down at Bethesda Terrace [1]. I’d headed down early one morning to shoot the iconic arches, but upon arriving noticed that there were two photo shoots at the foot of the stairway. I positioned myself opposite the stairs, shooting wide to include both the architecture and the silhouettes of the people framed inside the arches. Suddenly, a woman walking her dog and concentrating solely on her phone, walked down the centre of the steps into the middle arch. I waited until she was about even with the two photographers on either side before I fired the shot to create symmetry and balance in the image.
In my second shot I had set out to capture the architecture of Grand Central train station in New York City – where I found another instance of luck [2].
I intended to catch the early-morning sunlight shining through the eastfacing windows. After shooting and heading home, it wasn’t until I was processing the shot that I realized, I’d caught the couple in the middle of the frame in a fond embrace.
My last photograph was taken in my hometown of Pittsburgh, across from the office building where my law firm is located [3]. It is a long exposure of the bus turning with the pedestrian still in the arc of the bus’s curved route. I was fascinated by the pedestrian standing perfectly still, out in the street, as traffic closely rushed by him.
N-photo says
It’s clear from your images, Eric, that you relish the opportunity to capture something unique when on the street. Your couples’ embrace in the station, oblivious dog walker on the stairs, and still pedestrian on the street corner all demonstrate this.
You have some solid work here, and in particular we’d like to highlight your composition and visual structure of the shot at Bethesda Terrace [1]. Your central composition allows the architecture to remain symmetrical through the frame with minimal parallax distortion, thereby accurately rendering the archways as they appear in real life. The decision to wait until the dog walker reached a central location on the steps also shows creative flair, recognizing the need for balancing visual weight in the composition.
The image in Grand Central station certainly shows off the size of the windows with light pouring through the area [2]. However, in terms of a street photograph, we’d like to see a closer crop on the couple in the centre of the frame. Their body shape is elegant and casts a graceful shadow beneath them, but they’re simply too far away in the photograph for us to delegate significant focus to them. Perhaps this composition
would work if the space around them were devoid of people, or even if they were blurred with the couple remaining sharp standing still in the centre. But we appreciate that you didn’t even notice the couple until after-the-fact, so we understand why you chose to compose in this way.
Your final long exposure shot of the bus and the pedestrian demonstrates this subject-isolating technique perfectly [3]. With the pedestrian remaining still enough, the world rushes by him in a motion blur. By using a long exposure it also draws out emotive content that we wouldn’t see with a fast shutter speed. Who would really want to stand that close to a speeding bus, in the middle of the road? Is the person late to work, or simply impatient? All these questions arising from one picture tells us that the image works. We suggest you refine your approach and head out to shoot with these opportunities in mind, rather than waiting for them to happen. You’ve had good success in making strong photos by happenstance, and it’d be interesting to see your results if you put your mind to shooting exclusively street photos, even if it were just a few days at a time.
I was fascinated by the pedestrian standing perfectly still, out in the street, as traffic closely rushed by him