Categories
iPhone Photography Street Photography

Capturing the Art in Everyday Scenes

Street photography captures candid, unposed shots of people in public places. Unlike posed portraiture, street photography relies on spontaneity, serendipity, and impulse. The street photographer must have a quick eye to capture fleeting moments. As such, street photography is fundamentally an art of observation.

Henri Cartier-Bresson is often considered the father of modern street photography. His concept of the “decisive moment” emphasizes the photographer capturing the perfect instant within a scene. Famous examples like Behind the Gare St. Lazare show his knack for capturing those transient moments brimming with visual energy. His street photographs play with geometry, reflection, and movement in a lyrical way.

Helen Levitt was a pioneer of street photography in New York starting in the 1930s. She captured the daily life, humor, and grit of the city’s neighborhoods. Levitt often photographed children at play. Her work poetically captures the transitory joys within urban life. She had a gift for uncovering whimsy amid the mundane.

In the 1960s, Robert Frank’s seminal book The Americans cemented street photography as an art form. His work stripped away romantic notions of America through raw, gritty, ironic photographs of real life. Frank traveled across the country and captured strangers, cities, cars, and open roads with an unwavering eye. His photographs reveal underlying emotions through powerful composition.

The work of these photographers matters because they transformed street photography into an artistic medium of observation, social commentary, and subjective expression. Their ability to capture visually arresting moments imparting deeper meaning put street photography on the artistic map.

Importantly, street photography is fundamentally about the eye of the photographer, not the camera itself. Many iconic street photographs were shot on nothing more than compact cameras or even modern smartphone cameras. The key is the photographer’s ability to see and capture meaningful moments in public settings. A great street photograph has more to do with vision and timing than expensive equipment.

Several years ago, I’d go out on the streets of San Francisco with a camera bag filled with a fewo Fujifilm cameras. I enjoyed shooting with those cameras – but, frankly, the gear became a hassle – one more thing to worry about. Increasingly, I found myself just pulling my iPhone out of my shirt pocket and capturing the moment with my iPhone camera. Perfectly adequate for almost any kind of street photography. In fact, shooting bursts is so easy with an iPhone that I might do that and then select one image out of many that I shot in a second or two of shutter time.

One other advantage of street photography compared to, let’s just say, landscape photography, is that you’re usually just steps away from a spot where you can take a break, sit down, have a cup of coffee or lunch, etc. before getting back out on the streets. It’s a much better pursuit for older folks like me, rather than hiking the hills out in some national park somewhere to capture one of the iconic vistas! I’ve attended many photo workshops over the years, and I’ve come to smile at how there’d often be a line of us workshop participants with our cameras on our tripods, shooting essentially the same scene! So, so different from street photography. Both certainly have their place, but I’ve outgrown my early interest in landscape photography and now enjoy street photography much more—at least when we’re not in a pandemic and people are actually out on the streets!

Categories
iPhone 13 Pro Max Photography San Francisco/California Street Photography

Back to The City

For many years, I met my good friend and photo buddy Doug Kaye almost every week on Fridays in San Francisco. We’d meet at the Ferry Building and head out walking from there – exploring the streets of San Francisco in a most leisurely way. Taking our time when we saw something that captured our interest, a scene that seemed particularly interesting.

As our tastes evolved, we became increasingly drawn to finding places with the best light, the most interesting light. Chasing the best, most interesting light and then slowing down to capture slices of time – as people would pass through while we watched and waited.

After a couple of hours walking the streets, we’d find one of our favorite places for lunch, kick back a bit and take a breather, perhaps do a quick review of the images we’d captured, and enjoy each other’s company over a shared table.

Then Covid hit… and everything changed. Those walks on the streets of San Francisco just stopped. Our photography interests changed during Covid – they had to change! The circumstances forced our hands – we had to abandon our love of street photography. We no longer had our favorites streets to walk. The people were gone. You know the feeling…

Last week we reinvigorated some of those old memories – meeting up in San Francisco again after over two years of being absent. We traveled light – no heavy camera gear – and we did do a lot of street walking. We stayed along The Embarcadero, shared lunch outdoors at Waterbar and went to see the new exhibition that’s just opened at Pier 24. We had a great time – it brought back memories of those years we’d walked the streets.

Doug summed our time up nicely:

Yeah, it was a great day. Good weather, good food, good friends. Hard to beat.

Here are a few images from our time in San Francisco – all taken with my iPhone 13 Pro Max.

Categories
Black and White iPhone Xs Max Paris Photography Photography - Black & White Photography - Sony RX100M6 Street Photography

Paris Streets

During a brief layover in Paris recently I hit the streets with my iPhone and a Sony RX100M6 to see what I might see. Here are a few from a couple of hours on the street.

Capturing the Pantheon
Glance
I See
Two Pairs
The Couple
Intense Conversation
Rider
Making a Selfie
Categories
Blogs/Weblogs Inspiration Photographers Photography Street Photography

On Not Being Eric Kim

Admiration. That’s what I have for street photographer, blogger, and vlogger Eric Kim. I started following Eric’s blog several years ago as he began actively writing about the joys he found in street photography. His blogging efforts led him to pursue teaching street photography classes in various cities around the world and, more recently with his partner Cindy, an active publishing (both open source and for sale) and photo gear related business (see his product page).

Eric’s blogging has evolved beyond the mechanics of street photography into his philosophy of life – his joys, his worries, and his endless pursuit of creativity. I enjoy reading him for his quick comments and insights – almost always stimulating my thoughts off in an unexpected direction. Reading his work and watching his talks open my mind in new ways.

Recently, Eric gave a talk at Google which is available for watching on YouTube. One of the best parts of his talk – much of which is focused on his approaches to creativity – starts at about 19:30 into the video. He shares one of the photos of an older woman with a big smile that he captured years ago on the streets of New York City. His description of that image, how he shot and and his interaction with the audience about the photo is just great. (He sells a signed limited edition of this print on his website.) He’s written about this on his blog as well.

As for me, Eric’s had an impact recently – he’s helped jumpstart me back into more actively writing for my blog. Watching his work, I’ve come to realize that sharing is both worthwhile and also easy to do with today’s blogging tools. I’m able to quickly have an idea and – on any of my computers or mobile devices – being drafting a blog post on that idea.

This post is a great example. While waiting for my coffee to brew this morning, I was thinking about Eric and that segment where he shares the store of the smiling older woman. That got me thinking about how I admire what he does – and what he’s been doing for years now. And so here we are. Thanks Eric!

Categories
Photography Stanford Street Photography

Magic at Stanford

I took advantage of yesterday’s Presidents’ Day parking enforcement holiday to take a walk around the campus. As I was coming into the Quad, I happened across what appeared to be a model shoot underway – with a lady in a red dress standing in the sunlight under columns.

I captured the image with my iPhone Xs Max and edited it on my iPhone using Adobe’s Photoshop Express – which includes a wonderful variety of tools to get creative with images – including adding reflections. Fun!

Categories
iPhone Xs Max San Francisco/California Street Photography

A favorite spot: San Francisco’s Ferry Building

Whenever I meet up with my photo buddy Doug Kaye for a few hours of San Francisco street photography, we almost always meet at San Francisco’s Ferry Building. I find it convenient to drive to BART and then take it to the Embarcadero station which is just across from the Ferry Building – a quick 5 minute walk and I’m there. 

This time of year, the sun angle (both low in the sky and the direction it is casting shadows) make for interesting photos outside the Ferry Building. Here are three examples – two were taken out the window on the Bay side of the building adjacent to Peet’s Coffee. The third was taken outside in front of the Ferry Building shooting directly into the sun.

There are a couple of other great photography locations here – especially the indoor marketplace area with its superb indirect overhead light – I’ll share a few examples of images taken there in a future post.

All three of these images were taken with an iPhone Xs Max and it’s superb camera! All of these images were also shared previously on my Instagram account.

Categories
Hong Kong Street Photography Travel

Street Photography in Hong Kong

IMG_8306My photo buddy Doug Kaye and I traveled to Hong Kong in April for a week of street photography. It was a perfect time of year and the right length of time to be there.

This week Doug shares some of his thoughts from our trip on The Traveling Image Makers podcast with Ugo Cei and Ralph Velasco. It’s a great listen!

Categories
Hong Kong Lightroom Lightroom CC Photography Photography Workflow Street Photography

Using Lightroom CC for a new mobile workflow while traveling

I was recently in Hong Kong for a week of street photography. While there, I used a different mobile-centric workflow for my images – and, while it wasn’t perfect, it definitely simplified things. Here’s the basic idea:

Gear: I traveled with my MacBook Pro (with LR CC), my iPhone, and my iPad Pro (both with LR Mobile). At home there’s an iMac with my master photo library managed by Lightroom CC Classic. For this to work well, your hotel (or AirBnb, etc) also needs to be “well connected” – especially in terms of upstream bandwidth.

Workflow: After a day of shooting, I used Adobe Bridge on my MacBook Pro to import images from my camera’s SD cards into a date-based folder hierarchy on the MacBook’s SSD. Separately, I used Image Capture to import photos from my iPhone – and copied those images into the same date-based folder hierarchy. (Alternatively, I could have simply opened LR Mobile on my iPhone and imported the iPhone images I wanted into LR from my Camera Roll). Each day I had a new folder with all of the images from my cameras and my iPhone.

Next I opened Lightroom CC (LRCC) on my MacBook Pro and import the new images from the folder hierarchy (e.g. the images imported using Bridge and Image Capture in step 1). LRCC will import these images and immediately begin uploading them with the cloud. For this uploading to be efficient, you’ll want to be sure you’re using hotel WiFi with decent upstream bandwidth – something that worked very well for us in our Hong Kong hotel – but which could be problematic at less well connected hotels.

As LRCC uploads the images to the cloud, several good things happen:

The images are also sync’d to LR Mobile on my iPad and iPhone. They just start showing up as the syncing completes. The images are also sync’d to Lightroom CC Classic running on my iMac back home. If Lightroom Classic isn’t open on my Mac (or if my Mac is powered off), the syncing begins when Lightroom Classic is next opened on my Mac. LR Classic will download the images from the cloud and save them to a special folder – which I’ve pointed to a folder just for this purpose in my images folder hierarchy. In LR Classic preferences, I’ve also clicked the “use date hierarchy” box so that the downloaded images will be stored in a date hierarchy folder structure within that specified download folder.

When I get back home, I can open LR Classic and move the images from the download folder into the normal date-based folders in my image library. LR will remember that these images – although they’ve been moved – are still synced to the cloud. Thus, any changes I make to an image will be sync’d everywhere – including any ratings updates, any photo edits, cropping, etc. Even deletions will be sync’d everywhere.

The net effect of this workflow is that I avoided having to do the old catalog import workflow from LR Classic on my MacBook Pro into LR Classic on my iMac when I got home.

But the BIG benefit of this LR CC-based workflow was having my images quickly available for reviewing, editing, rating, etc. on my iPhone and iPad while I was traveling in the field. In addition, any images I shot on my iPhone could be imported into LR Mobile on my iPhone and they’d automatically be sync’d into the Lightroom cloud and down to my LR Mobile on my iPad and to LR Classic my iMac back home.

I should also mention that once the images have been imported to LR CC on my MacBook Pro, they can be deleted from the folder hierarchy on the MacBook. Once the originals are sync’d to the cloud by LR CC they are no longer needed locally on the MacBook Pro. Of course, I didn’t do any deleting while traveling – as I wanted the redundancy (in addition to keeping the SD cards) – but I could have – and will at some point back home!

I just found a YouTube (10 min long) video by Ted Forbes that also describes this workflow.

Categories
iPhone 7 Plus Photography San Francisco/California Street Photography

Exploring San Francisco’s Embarcadero with my iPhone 7 Plus 

I often meet up with my friend Doug Kaye for a couple of hours of street photography in San Francisco. We often meet  at San Francisco’s Ferry Building and head out from there along San Francisco’s Embarcadero towards Pier 24 (which is directly under where the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge heads out over the Bay).

Pier 24 — a beautiful space dedicated to photographic exhibitions — (one reviewer calls it “the quietly spectacular waterfront cathedral for photography“) has a new exhibition that recently opened titled “The Grain of the Present.” Pier 24 requires advance reservations which we had made a couple of weeks prior.

This particular exhibition “examines the work of 10 photographers at the core of the Pilara Foundation collection — Robert Adams, Diane Arbus, Lewis Baltz, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Lee Friedlander, Nicholas Nixon, Stephen Shore, Henry Wessel, and Garry Winogrand — whose works share a commitment to looking at everyday life as it is.” It also features additional photography by Eamonn Doyle, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Ed Panar, Alec Soth, Awoiska van der Molen, and Vanessa Winshi.

It’s quite a collection of beautiful work,  and the opportunity to see it displayed in the beautiful space of Pier 24 makes for a great experience. If you enjoy great photography, do try to see this new exhibition at Pier 24, just remember that it requires you make a reservation a few weeks in advance. Pier 24’s reservation system helps pace visitor entry further enhancing the experience.

Along the way, both back and forth from the Ferry Building to Pier 24, we walked slowly — cameras in hand — and had fun capturing some moments of street photography. I had my favorite street photography camera long (a Fujifilm X100F) but I never pulled it out of the bag.  I was only shooting using the camera in my iPhone 7 Plus. Sometimes I enjoy going very minimalist, and using just my iPhone puts me in that frame of mind!

Below are some example images shot on the iPhone 7 Plus, post-processed using the Photos app on the iPhone, and tweaked using Google’s Snapseed application — also on the iPhone. This was a totally iPhone photography day! Follow more of my street photography on Instagram.

Four Corners//embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.js

Bay Glow//embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.js

Smile//embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.js

Just Resting//embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.js

Easy Rider//embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.js

Little Man//embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.js

Categories
Black and White France Fujifilm X100T Fujifilm X70 Paris Photography Photography - Black & White Photography - Fujifilm X100T Photography - Fujifilm X70 Street Photography

Paris in Late September

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Two years ago I attended a Paris street photography workshop led by Valérie Jardin – see my first post about that here. Most of my Paris posts are here.

This year I repeated the exercise – heading back to the City of Light for another superb week of street photography. Valérie is a superb workshop leader – and my photo buddy Doug Kaye was also signed up to go. I couldn’t resist flying back to Paris for a week on the streets in late September!

The weather was ideal – one rainy morning but otherwise spectacular fall days with beautiful light and the lower sun angle that this time of year provides such niche light/shadow contrasts.

I traveled light – shooting with my Fujifilm X100T and the even smaller Fujifilm X70 – both are superb cameras for street photography.

Below are a few of my favorites from the trip – you’ll find even more here in this Flick set. Enjoy!

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Mirror magic//embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.js

Lit//embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.js

Sweetie//embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.js

Close #2//embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.js