Positioning yourself
If you wander the streets, expecting to find interesting subjects, you'll take fewer good photos.
Hence you need a strategy for taking photos.
It's best to remain in one spot, and let the people come to you. So, first and foremost, find somewhere to sit.
It's much easier to take street photos if you have a location that's unobtrusive and where you can stay for some period of time. Good places are:
- a street table at a cafe
- street bench
- seat on an underground train
A small child is transfixed. If you sit on a bench long enough, you’ll find subjects.
The street cafe
If you position yourself at the outermost table of a cafe, you'll have an uninterrupted view of people walking towards you.
Disguise the camera by littering the table with cups and books, and with luck you'll look like just another boulevardier.
Street bench
Not all cities have benches in the right place. Some put them in parks where you only see the occasional walker.
But if you can find a bench in a shopping thoroughfare, it's often a good spot.
TIP: I like to have my partner with me. Two people are less conspicuous than one. A solitary person tends to be a potential source of trouble or, if you're a woman, a potential sex partner among ever hopeful men. But couples belong to each other.
Street steps
If there are steps on a street, they provide a good vantage point.
Few cities are built on level ground. And sometimes they accommodate changes in height by adding pedestrian steps. They can provide a place for you to sit and snap passers-by.
Low steps are a good place to sit and take photos. Embankment, London.
Seat on an underground train
Many street photographers take pictures in underground trains.
Because it’s a specialist topic, there's a chapter devoted to it in ‘Photos on trains’.
Buses don't work so well because everyone is facing the front, as in a classroom. The same applies to many overground trains,.
But on an underground train you often face people. And many passengers stay on for just three or four stations. So there's a constant new set of subjects.
If you get embarrassed or there are no interesting faces, you can hop out of the carriage when the train stops at a station, and get into the next one. Or wait for the next train.
Taking photos from a car
Some photographers shoot from a car window. For this, you'll need someone to drive you around.
It isn't ideal because you need to be stationary, to prevent a blurred picture, and a car is usually in the move.
Also, people can be frustratingly far away when you're in a car.
Pedestrians are often fleeting - they walk towards the car, and you drive towards them, making the moment when they fill the frame very brief.
You also miss half the people because you can only see those who are walking towards you.
Shooting from the first floor
You can sometimes get good photos from a raised location, such as a verandah or the first floor of a building.
The disadvantage of this is that your photos don't confront people head on, so they lack some immediacy and intimacy. And secondly you see the tops of people's heads. When you see such photos, you’ll know the photographer hasn't faced their subject.