6 Non-technical ways you can use to level up your street photography game

Among the several genres of photography, Street Photography is something that takes a whole lot of time and patience to master. Streets are the best place to get the best stories and emotions and tell powerful stories.

While shooting on the streets, you must be dynamic and spontaneous so that you don’t miss any moments. So through this blog, we are going to share with you a few tips and insights on how you can be a better street photographer and unleash the hidden photography gem within you. Let’s get started.

Stay Light

While hitting the streets with your camera, you have to make sure you are carrying less equipment as possible and staying light so that you can try various angles and be dynamic with situations around. Instead of focusing on changing lenses and camera you can focus more on the content and create candid shots.

If you are in extreme hurriedness, then you can even use smartphones to capture meaningful shots. Almost all smartphones these days come with nice cameras which are quite enough to capture the essence of street photography. Likewise, you can shoot in "RAW" mode and can edit the images in post-processing.

Take your time and search for stories

Storytelling is the key to creating engaging photos whereas, the best stories can be discovered in the hustling streets. But how do you search for stories and begin to tell them through your images? How do you turn a moment into a thoughtful image? Creating a sense of mystery is the best way to capture the viewer’s attention. Just take your time, wander around the street for a while, look up to the small things and be patient so that you don’t end getting out of focus or blurry images.

Expression of Feelings and Emotions

Emotions of impatience, frustration, anxiety, hustle, smiles, and boredom can add beauty to your photographs. Instead of photographing with just the intention of capturing interesting people, you can try to incorporate emotions and gestures about the subject and try to convey the mood of your subject to your audience. Don’t differentiate people solely based on their facial features or clothing. Nothing can beat the portraits when it comes to portraying or expressing emotions. Sometimes, the most uninteresting person you perceive in your mind may aesthetically give you the best photo in your life with a single powerful expression.

Use of Lights and Reflections

The more patient you are, the more aware you will be about your surroundings. There are a lot of ways you can get creative in street photography. The more you look around for interesting scenes to photograph, the more you realize the presence of lights and reflections.

Sometimes you just don’t want the reflections to be in your scene. But they happen to come occasionally and there will be nothing you can do. The best way to remove such reflection is to position yourself in such an angle where they don’t seem to appear.

Photographing a reflection might give you a flat image that lacks contrast. When objects are reflected or shown through a glass, they don’t usually stand out compared to that when you were directly looking at the subject. In this case, you can use Lightroom or any other editing program to increase the contrast highlights, play with various other elements, and give meaning to that image.

Trying black and white can be a better option for reflection photos. This allows the highlights, shadows, and tones to come together to create an interesting scene.  

Invest more time

The more you go to the streets and shoot, the more you will feel confident about yourself. Street photography is such a difficult skill to master and it will get worse if you don’t do it quite enough. So try making a shooting schedule and stick to that. Maybe it's twice or thrice in your week or 10 minutes in a day. This way your photos will eventually start to get better with time.

On the other hand, be light with your gears or you can switch to smartphones as well. We have seen many great photographers have used smartphones to capture the essence of the streets. It's not that you have to carry a DSLR camera every time. You just need a camera to practice and upon a time, you will be good at it. If you wonder how can we click better photos with smartphones, then imagine the situations in the older days, they don't have highly equipped gears to click amazing photos, and most of the smartphones these days have a better camera than previous cameras. So, keep clicking and invest more time with your gears. The more you play with it, the more it will become handy.

Don't run after perfection

The main mistake beginner photographers make is trying to create the perfect image and miss important events or moments. Perfection is a myth and you will create beautiful images once you become consistent and master your camera. Don't run after perfection, it will come naturally if you give enough time to yourself and your camera.

We do wonder how one can make beautiful & extraordinary paintings from the empty canvas, right? It's similar to the paintings, once you get used to it, you can create anything. For this, regular practice is a must.

These are the few non-technical ways you can use to level up your street photography game. Streets are undoubtedly the best places to unleash your photography skills as so many things go simultaneously on the street.

Besides this, you can experiment with every style of photography on the streets. Just try being creative and try various perspectives, angles, and try capturing emotions on the streets to the fullest.