Catherine Kubillus in a coffeeshop, a view on Moulin Rouge. A street photo taken through the window of a Starbucks coffee shop in Paris, of course with the important reflection of the Moulin Rouge.
Street photography inspires me, it seems to plain but says so much. It’s one of the types of photography I like the most. I’m often mesmerized by the works of Robert Doisneau, Izis and Henri Cartier Bresson. I can go through their photography for hours, while I’m doing accolades I want to give a salute to Thorsten Overgaard (who did some official photography of Catherine), that does some amazing modern street and portrait photography.
But it looks so much easier than it is. It’s a lot more technical than cityscapes because there is no time. The thing with street photography is that one needs to use the camera without thinking about it, by the time you got your settings figured out the opportunity is gone. There’s one chance and you’ll either get it or miss it.
Here’s the picture in higher resolution in case you want to download it.
If there’s any advice I can give when you’re going to go out for street photography it’s the following:
1. Set your aperture to 5.6, iso to 800 and leave the capera on aperture priority. This doesn’t work for everything but it should get at least 50% good shots as long as it’s in daylight.
2. Think with contrasts between foreground and background. Thus go for places where the background is already pretty strong and you just wait for the foreground to show-up.
3. Shoot highest resolution possible, half of the photo will need to be cropped to make the picture great, so if you did it in medium jpeg mode – you can probably trash the image.
And if you need inspiration, check out the photographers above, they’re pretty amazing.
Martin Soler Photography 