How and why I shoot STREET PHOTOGRAPHY from the hip

[Music] about two months into starting this channel I posted a video that was a POV street photography video shot in Bournemouth it was well received there were lots of really nice comments but it seemed to trigger a small minority of people there were quite a few people who didn't really agree with the way that I was shooting now the gist of the comments were based around this idea that because I didn't put my camera up to my eye I couldn't possibly be a proper stre photographer bizarrely I had the same issue on a street workshop last year in Brighton some guy had listened into conversation I was having with some of the delegates and he decided to have a go at me for exactly the same thing apparently you can't be a proper Street photographer if you don't stand in front of somebody and put the camera up to your ey so all of this just doesn't make any sense to me many great Street photographers have developed ways of working which allow them to remain unnoticed while working on the street Tony Ray Jones for example would often get his wife to stand between him and the subjects so whenever he pointed his camera towards his subjects they would think he was taking a photograph of his wife saw lighter often used a Telo lens for his work now obviously that was an artistic choice but that voyerism obviously allowed him to be a distance away from them in order to shoot unnoticed Walker Evans and Helen levit famously used right angle viewfinders for their cameras so that they could be looking in One Direction while the camera was looking in another other again to remain unnoticed to be able to Capture Moments without the subject being camera aware which was incredibly important to their way of working now Fred Herzog Joseph cadela Raymond depardon are all on record as saying that they often shot without bringing the camera up to their eye does the fact that they didn't look through the viewfinder make their photographs any less credible maybe the thing for most people is to accept that there are different ways of shooting maybe learning to shoot in a certain way which doesn't attract attention on the street can be considered to be a valuable creative tool it can certainly give you photographs that the traditional stand in front of someone bring the camera to the eye and press the shutter techniques [Music] can't now I actually hate the term shooting from the hip as the vast majority of my images aren't shot anywhere near hip level I'm too short you know so but as people will know it refers to a style which doesn't involve looking through the viewfinder so we're going to use that for the purposes of this video now as I've mentioned before on this channel I used to take quite static Street photographs I would often line something up in the viewfinder then wait for somebody to walk through the frame and then take that photograph it was safe it was very static it was very easy to shoot my images didn't really say anything about me as a photographer and they certainly didn't say anything about the people that I was photographing so to change that I moved to wider lenses decided to get closer to the subjects I also started to shoot in a very reactionary way often seeing things in a a split second and taking the photograph in a split second particularly when I was working in crowds I often found that I didn't have the time to bring my camera up to the eye whenever I saw something so I learned to shoot from chest height and waist height and near my face and at 90° and even from my back now my images as a result had more energy and the process made me a lot more enthusiastic about taking pictures and let's be honest if we aren't enthusiastic we won't go out onto the street to go and take photographs now I also like the randomness of getting images like this I like the Happy accidents and the different perspective and of course shooting from the hip is very non-confrontational if you do it correctly and this suits my personality I'm not the type of photographer that likes to go up to people and strike up a conversation I'm much more interested in documenting what happens on the street without me being involved in it I need to do what I do with some level of authenticity and the only way I can do this is to remain largely unnoticed so I put the hours and the miles into practicing shooting from the hip and eventually I became quite proficient at it proportionately these days I get more Keepers shooting from the hip than I do from shooting with a camera to my [Music] eye now for me I found the best way of shooting from the hip is just to walk and react sometimes I'll be walking down the street and I'll see a potential photograph and I'll have a certain amount of time where I can change my angle of approach and I can kind of get an idea in my mind's eye of how this picture is going to look I'll then bring my camera up to whatever height I actually need it to be in order to get the photograph which I've kind of prev visualized if that's the right way of describing it now the whole process of shooting from the hip isn't as random as people like to think it is it takes an enormous amount of concentration to do it successfully and consistently the more that you do this the more that you practice the more hours you spend on the street the better you become at prev visualizing a shot but sometimes an image might just happen immediately in front of me I can literally be walking down a street and something totally random happens and I'll just react and take the photograph and in most cases I'm usually right on top of the photograph so the camera angle tends to be quite low in this case the downside to shooting this way is always going to be the frame you're never going to be 100% in control of what you have in the frame and for some people that's enough not to to do this you know um Sarah would go completely around the bend if she had to shoot this way she needs to know what's in all four corners of her frame before she presses the shutter now shooting from the hip is well suited to wide angle lenses because you have more chance of getting something in the frame but I've actually shot from the hip using a 50 mil 35 mil 28 mil and a 21 mm now I did try to shoot from the hip once with a 75 mm um but that wasn't such a great experience not because of the field of view but because I was so far away from the subject I couldn't get a sense of what the lens would see it was really harder to prev visualize what I was going to take I've always preferred to use Zone focusing when shooting from the hip depending on which lens I'm using and how close I am to the subject I'll generally set the distance to about 12 ft 6 ft if I'm working close and on top of people like in a crowd scene for example the main idea is to create a zone of focus which allows me to capture everything that I want in the scene and I'll nearly always use f8 to do this I have used autofocus when shooting from the hip in the past and I'll be honest it's really hit and miss you don't know for sure what the camera's locked on and you can't check when you're shooting and often times when the AF doesn't actually lock onto something or gets confused about what it's supposed to lock onto the shutter won't fire so you end up missing the shot anyway so for me AF and shoot from the hip isn't the best combination now shutter speed is really important if you think about what I'm doing for a second I'm in motion I'm Inari walking the subject that I'm looking at might well be in motion as well and the camera will certainly be in motion if I'm working that fast so I need a shutter speed that's fast enough to be able to stop all that movement so I was trying to keep the shutter speed up usually around 500th of a second if there isn't enough light for such a high speed when I'm shooting I might just physically stop up just for a split second while I pressed the shutter just to help with any problems with camera Shake now I don't like to work this way particularly because if you're imagine you're walking along in a group of people or or past a group of people then all of a sudden you stutter you stop that's a weird behavior for anybody to do and of course it just attracts attention so for the past couple of years to overcome this I've been working really hard on judging distances now for me the success of shooting from the hip relies on knowing shooting distances so if you can judge where 6 feet is and where 12 ft is you can shoot at wider apertures and get pretty accurate with it and the biggest benefit to this of course is the wider you shoot the higher your shutter speed can go so if the light is dropping I can quite comfortably shoot at f2 or f1.4 and still keep my shutter speed up so that I still keep everything nice and sharp also if you have a a distance which you consistently shoot at a preferred distance if you like my case it's 12 ft you can start to understand how your lens will render a particular scene you know roughly what it's going to look like and what's going to be included in that frame and the other piece of advice that I would give is try and stick to one lens even if it's just for the close-up shooting from the hip kind of start you'll get to know what the lens records you'll get to an idea of how it renders things spatially so if you shoot with a 35 mm consistently you will see how all the elements fit into the frame you'll understand the relationship between foreground elements and background elements if you keep Cho and changing lenses say you go from a 35 to a 28 the 28 mm has more forr Distortion than a 35 mm and objects in the background will appear further away so if you're going backwards and forwards shooting from the hip it's very difficult to understand what your lens is actually going to see and the final point I'd like to make and it kind of goes all the way back to the start of this video just ignore those people who wish to give you their opinion on this what puts a lot of photographers off this technique it's not the hours that you need to put in it's not the the experience that you need or getting to know your lenses and distances none of that it's the fact that there's this perception that shooting from the hip isn't proper photography and I'm often amazed at how many people who perpetuate this nonsense never show their photographs you never see any of their pictures they'll tell you what you do is wrong and how you're doing it is wrong but you never see any photographs now nobody has the right to tell anybody how to take photographs taking photographs is personal to you and how you take those photographs is also personal to you myself and Sarah for example have two completely different ways of shooting on the same street at the same time with the same subject we often come up with completely different photographs ultimately it's the image that's important not what it was shot with or how it was shot so thanks for watching if you enjoy this video please think about subscribing if you haven't already and I'll see you on the next video take care [Music] [Music]

Channel: Walk Like Alice

Views: 134,436

Keywords: street photography, shooting from the hip, leica camera, leica monochrom, leica street photography, zone focusing, street tips

Id: 80o90Q2FaUo

Length: 10min 28sec (628 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 15 2024