I know perfectly well that street photography can be weird for some people. Walking around a city that you live in, aimlessly taking photos of strangers can be considered weird and even a little creepy. Well, that can be true if you start following people around or only taking photos of women, if you don’t do any of that, street photography is just another form of art. Or is it?
The best thing about street photography is that there are no limits. You can shoot anything and everything. You can decide to have a person in the shot or not, you can take photos of cars, buildings, lamp posts, street signs and even puddles and if you’re creative enough, it can all look great. There’s one catch, though. Having no limitations is the biggest limitation of them all.
The main reason why I mainly do street photography is the fact that it shows things as they are. You can’t make a cloudy day sunny, you can’t make an old person look younger. Well, you can but it would stop being street photography. At least for me, street photography has to be candid and just slightly edited and that’s the reason why I only slightly boost the colors on my street shots.
Another big reason on why I love street photography so much is that there can be so much emotion in it. Through street photography you can express happiness, sadness, loneliness, love, even depression and there are countless ways to do it. I have never been very expressive, and it has always been hard for me to express the way I feel so that is why I appreciate that quality of street photography so much.
One more reason to appreciate that genre is the fact that it gives you a completely different outlook at the world. Once you start looking for shots on the streets, you start seeing the differences in people’s income, behavior and even intelligence. It’s simply fascinating.
When you travel (not that you will any time soon), street photography can give you the opportunity to explore areas of the city you’re in that you would’ve never seen otherwise, it helps you understand the locals.
Something that I tend to do on and off is to walk around and take photos with my earphones off and I am someone who’s always got them on when going somewhere (gen Z…). When I go out to shoot though sometimes, I just want to feel like I’m a part of something bigger and be fully immersed in the city. I want to be able to feel all the smells, hear all the sounds, see all the lights. I want to fully feel the city’s pulse. Not having earphones on comes with another advantage. You take away one of the barriers between you and your subject. You’re much more approachable if you don’t have them on and people are more likely to talk to you, be it to ask you what on earth do you see on a regular street or why the fuck are you taking their picture. In any case, the positives outweigh the negatives.
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