7 Street Photography Tips - Minimalistic Approach

in minimalistic Street photographs we want to use only a few elements it's all about excluding something from the composition in this approach the philosophy is less is more hi it's Peter here and let's get right into the business the urban environment has lots of things to be included in the photographs and if you photograph everything it might be a bit of bit of too much in the image usually three elements or three points that might interest the viewer is enough and in minimalistic we will trying to make that so that there's only one so simple backgrounds are a key but of course in a busy City that might not be possible so sometimes you might have to wait for something to happen or people to move away from the uh area that you're photographing so that there aren't so many people in the photograph and think about the composition beforehand and then just you know get your settings in the camera all set for that particular shot that you have in your mind and then just press the shadow button when that thing happens that way you will maximize the minimalistic look in your image if you are patient and if you look uh your composition beforehand and a tip for a simple background tilt your camera slightly downwards to crop out the top part which is usually busy so aiming a little lower might get rid of that busy background and you might get a really nice minimalistic Street photograph focus on details urban areas and cities have lots and lots of details that can make really great minimalistic images just grab a partial thing of the of the scene so crop and leave something out out and that will make the image more minimalistic to to leave something out that's the whole key and the whole point of this and details also can tell a great stories you know you're leaving something out people start wondering what the detail is and what what's all about this and it doesn't tell you everything and that's one great part of minimalistic Photography is that it kind of leaves out stuff for the people to uh use their imagination and sometimes times the images can be a bit abstract and you don't really realize what it is and there's a tip for this usually we use something like 28 to 50 mm lens and everything between when we're doing Street photographs but for details you might have a bit longer lens that makes it easier to isolate stuff and pick up those details even a bit further away or high up in a building so a 75 mm could be sometimes a very good lens for Street photographs if you're going for the details and minimalistic images and negative space well negative space is probably the most UN commonly used way of making minimalistic images because to be honest most of the minimalistic images do have a lot of negative space and what negative space is it's an empty space around the subject usually if you have 2/3 of the area is or there is nothing then it's it's called negative space some call it white space but negative space is probably more used term for that and it doesn't mean that it has to be empty but it needs to be something that is not too distracting and will take our attention away from the subject that's a key to understand that it doesn't have to be you know just empty or anything like that but having very little elements around the subject is the thing when you want to do minimalistic photographs using a large amount of negative space and a tip if you can't find any calm background why not using moving object as your background here's an example I was sitting and waiting at the Metro station wanted to photograph using the Metro coach as a background for my image of a person standing and waiting for the metro to arrive the way it goes you take a longer shutter speed and then just wait wait for the right moment and it might take a little while to find someone that suits your image then geometry and lines look for geometric shapes and strong lines in your environment straight lines curved lines can direct your viewer to the subject usually just an empty street with some Shadows for example or some lines and and stuff like that can be an image but if someone steps into the image or you can see someone in the image it usually gets better so sometimes when you're doing minimalistic photographs it's good thing to wait for something to happen or something to enter the uh frame so sometimes adding an element might boost up the image and then shallow depth of field in classical Street photographs we very seldom want shallow depth of field we usually want to stop down because we want everything to be sharp in the image and also one Reas reason to stop down is to to when we using pre focusing method so that we focus to a certain distance let's say like 4 MERS and we stop down to eight and with a wideangle lens a 35 28 40 mm lens basically everything is sharp so you don't need to worry about the focusing and the reason of course is because that's the way to make the photographing a lot lot faster but of course sometimes shallow dep of Field opening up the aperture and making making the background really nice and blurry can be a very strong image and that really uh brings the sharp subject to to our eyes because the separation from the background is so obvious so sometimes that is a a great way of making negative space just to throw out of focus everything that's kind of disturbing in the background and that works quite well in many images too but remember in classical Street photograph we want to see the environment so hiding the environment totally might not be a good idea but of course that's a kind of like an aesthetic decision that you as a photographer have to make and and of course it depends on your style too what what you know you like and what type of images you're making play around with light and Shadow Shadows are really important in a photograph having a really dark background can serve as a negative space you know Expos for the highlights you will make the Shadows even darker and in post you can make the image more contrasty by you know adjusting the curve or just uh adjusting the contrast slider that will make contrast between the light part and the dark and the black part bigger of course and when you have a light part we tend to see that first and then the black part will serve as a negative space I was taking this image I wouldn't call this a you know a minimalistic image because of the the heavy Shadow and and then light play what we have there the composition and everything could be minimalistic composition but the light makes it a bit too busy for to being a minimalistic image but when I was taking that image I saw from the corner of my eye that there was this girl with the red sweatsuit walking and luckily she went for the escalators down and I just quickly turned my camera to towards her and took the image and I think this one is minimalistic even though you have strong colors you have the black coat from from a guy that was following her or with her rather and the strong colors that we have on the on the light because of course I made it a bit warmer and I corupt it a bit because it happened so quickly so that I could catch the image because I like this image a lot and the dark area is you know a busy railway station well busy in our standards and with the black background I could throw that you know as a negative space and hide what's over there so that our eye will concentrate on the girl with the red uh sweatsuit and after the seventh tip I will have an extra tip or it's actually an extra treat and I'm so excited about that and it has something to do with the next tip too in a way limit your color palette sometimes lowering the saturation in an image makes it more minimalistic this can be done at the spot just photographing at the moment when there are not too many colors or only one color that can be desaturated in post production that's one good way that's what I always do in images there is something really bright like a traffic sign or something that's that's too much attention I might lower the saturation of that so that it's not so obvious anymore it doesn't distract the image and of course sometimes turning an image to black and white image might help in that too but that might not be the case if if your thing is to photograph color photographs then just desaturating the colors might do the trick which takes me to the extra tip or the extra treat for you guys I have created film simulation wizard with custom gpts it's totally free for you but you need an open AI Plus account in order to access this custom GPT I made film wizard for Rico gr3 and three gr 3x and also for Fuji extrand sensors you can write a prompt okay I want this and that type of film or you can use the four pre set questions or suggestions that you you could press and here is one for Rico gr3 I asked them to make me a street photograph style in film recipe and this what it gave me and of course this is not perfect far from it but it's a fun way to start making the film recipes and testing how they work and unfortunately you cannot really download these you have to you know just make them by hand into your camera or inside your camera and then of course remember to store them and and then use them but I think these are quite fun and some of the images that I showed you I did use these recipes but I will make a video about this later and I will tweak it a little bit but I will get you so-called early access to it and um and as I said it doesn't cost anything just you need to have an open AI Plus account to use it and let's talk a few more words about minimalistic Street photographs the whole point is to have an empty canvas like we always do when we start photographing but on this one when you're doing minimalistic photographs you really have to have it empty so that you can start adding components to it either by making a change in your your angle of view or changing the the position or the camera angle or whatever or wait for something to happen that adds the missing element to your image to make it more interesting and here is a video about street photography and how you can be invisible when you're photographing because that is one crucial part of being a street photographer is to know how to act when you making those Street photographs you might want to watch that if you haven't seen that yet but he thanks for watching and bye for now

Channel: Peter Forsgård

Views: 186,896

Keywords: photography, Peter Forsgard

Id: x9DaDNMI1BQ

Length: 12min 26sec (746 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 22 2024