How to Take Photos Like Henri Cartier-Bresson

this video is brought to you by masters of photography what do you say to people who call you the greatest photographer of the 20th century oh what's a polite word for it i don't think there is a polite word for it is that i said if there was one thing i would like to inherit from angry chippers we have taken photos it would not be his decisive moment but it would be his way of composing a photograph that sets him apart from everyone else welcome to episode four of how to take photos like in this video we're going to take photos like the godfather of street photography andrei kaczya prasan i have my mom with me here to document how we're going to take these photos and i have a gopro mounted here so you can see my point of view i hope you enjoy [Music] in this series where we talk about how to take photos like all these legendary photographers we're not going to try to copy their best photos like we just did right now it's not about that it's about trying to understand the principles of what made their photographs great so break down his composition which andrei kichapursan was famously known for the forms and shapes and how he prioritized that a lot higher than he did with light a lot of photographers they are solely focused on light and his was a lot more about forms and shapes so now we're going to go walk around in copenhagen and see if we can find some shape and forms also let me know what kind of photographers you would like to see in the future just comment below and let me know which one and upload the ones that you like what makes a great photograph for you a combination of a shape geometry and something that you can't describe which is sensitivity or imagination i don't know in terms of photographs you are a defining artist a founder and it's just so much talk to you it has no meaning to you trying to do better next time but so it's quicker than drawing let's go through the camera and equipment that he used when he took his legendary photographs he famously shot with the 35 millimeter leica rangefinder with a 50 millimeter lens as for his favorite film everything was black and white and he shot a lot of kodak triax and that's the film that we're gonna shoot with today he rated the film 400 as the box says nothing fancy and then he shot a shutter speed of 125th of a second more or less all the time and then he used the aperture to decide how much light he wanted i still don't have a leica nor do i have like a money for it but i have the fuji xt3 with a 35 millimeter lens on it and it's on the corrupt sensor so the focal length will be the equivalent of a 50 millimeter but this is digital so i also brought my roller flex as you see here and my roller flex is my go-to camera but it's used it shoots these square format photographs that he didn't do but since the roller flakes is my church of camera and my favorite one to take photos with i'm gonna apply his techniques of taking photographs to how i do it so we're gonna switch between the xt3 and the rolleiflex and then the xt3 has a cool feature a black and white simulation so everything i see right now i don't know if you guys can see it but everything i see now is in black and white through my viewfinder so we can kind of get an idea even if it's digital we can get an idea about how our photos will look in black and white let's do this for the walk with these two cameras and see how it goes now we just need someone to come in here that is not a runner in activewear but someone who is nicely dressed okay we got we have one person coming here i hope he doesn't start biking but let's see not this one [Music] i wish he was more isolated but let's keep going [Music] let's talk about aperture for a minute because it's important and a lot of people who do street photography we shoot with this very crazy shallow depth of field because our cameras allow it allow it if you look at this photograph which is one of my favorite photographs from kirchey basson i would have guessed it would be a william klein photograph because of the playfulness and spontaneity of it but imagine if it was taken with a aperture of let's say 1.5 then the girl and girls in the background who are like glazing and like following this boy carrying this wine and looking so proud they'll be blurred out but it's just so easy today to use this crazy shallow depth of field and if you want to take photos that are really really good layers are important i'm actually pretty happy with this photograph we just took on the bridge where you kind of split the image in two as kachip was almost famously known for doing as well not that the photograph that i took was very good at all but it was very different from what i usually do what i'm happy with about this photograph is that i spotted the potential of the scene in a scene that i would not usually look for or camp out for later on in his career he founded magnum magazines which one of the still today one of the biggest publications in photography and then he took a lot of war photography and he was actually a war prisoner as well and he was a big anarchist and that's funny like it's such a common thing for every photographer to have this anarchistic philosophy or ideology among all the greats i'm an anarchist fundamentally and so it doesn't exist an attitude a way of behaving loving finally finally about loving absolutely he was famously known for his candid street photography right but he also did portraits and it was one of the things that he found the most difficult actually so i think today we should also do a couple of street portraits while we're at it [Music] hey so apparently that was anarchist allen it's funny here in denmark when i speak the language i can get a little more involved with the subjects that i'm photographing and to all the doubters who said i can't just read portraits in denmark because i look like everyone else what's up shout out to anarchist allen focusing on these for different photographers forces you to uncommon places like i would never go in the king's garden here in denmark because i'm like what photo should i make here but it forces you to go to new places [Music] this is difficult i mean in mexico i usually walk around taking a lot of street portraits and now i need to really think about where the shapes and ride composition is so the title of this video is how to take photos like enrique person and i don't need to say this but we're not going to take photographs that can even come close to his legendary portfolio or his legendary resume of great photographs he's he might be the most popular photographer of all time but that doesn't mean we can't study the greats and that's the point of this whole series of how to take photos like and the cool thing about this since we have been starting this photo walk i've walked around solely focused on shapes and forms and composition and this decisive moment that he was famously known for we can't have those in the photograph so when they're away we're gonna take the photo so normally when i go around and i take portraits i look for emotion and faces and i've not thought about that for a second since we've been out right now so by doing this series for me and i hope for you guys too it gives us an opportunity to narrow focus and limit our options and then study these individuals and then let's say when i reach episode 10 or episode 20 then somewhere in my subconscious i will be a lot more focused on the shapes of angelic chaper son and the playfulness of william klein and all of these legends okay let's break down with some of his examples how he mastered composition let's start with leading lines which is one of the more easier way of composing a photograph as you see right here and as the photo we tried to imitate in the beginning of the video all of these lines they point towards the head of the subject which is why the name is leading lines another example of composing a photograph is using the rule of third which means you kind of split up your image and then you have the subject as you see here in one of the crossings of the image it's a very common one and a very easy one to to create as well let's talk about one of the more trickier ways to compose a photograph that he had a lot of success with as well and it's using a method called rule of arts and as it's implied in the name you take a photograph where one thing stands out one thing is the odd one usually that's in group of threes or fives but in this photograph you see here there's more than three people and there's more than five but you can kind of split the image in three group there's the priests on the left priest on the right and then a woman in motion between them so in this photograph she's the only woman in the photograph and she's the only one in motion so he kind of made a photograph using rule of arts and the decisive moment where he captured her right in between these two groups of priests and another ruling composition is called juxtaposition which is basically a fancy word for contrast or opposites and before i took the photography series i took this photograph as you see right here where there's a little girl running and one in wheelchair and that would be it's not an awesome photo but that would be in the category of juxtaposition another rule you can use in composition for photography is called a frame within a frame as he's doing right here very well and he's doing that a couple of times in his work but what he did really well is that he used his subjects in a way that he framed his photos using geometry as you see right here and the last way of composing a photograph maybe even the most difficult one is using this thing called the golden ratio i mean i don't know how you would even do it or where to begin but these are some of examples where he's do it where he has done it better than anyone else the funny thing is that it's not just finding and taking these photographs i'm sure he came home with a photograph that he didn't even notice had this golden ratio in it but because of his trained eye from arts then when he browsed through all of his contact sheets he would recognize it and that's almost as difficult as taking the photograph that is recognizing that you took a great photograph also he didn't crop his photos he's famously known for never touching it he thought the photograph should be made within the camera you never cropped your photographs no never if you shoot properly well it's fair yet one of his most famous photographs as you see right here this jumping man this is actually not the original photograph this is the original photograph as you see here and he couldn't get closer to the man so he had to crop out this uh this gate that you see here which is kind of ironic [Music] he was notoriously known for wanting to have his work printed and not in a magazine even though he was a photojournalist for life which is a very big accomplishment for a photographer he wanted it shown in museums curated or in a photo book and if anyone has ever made a photo book worth learning from it's his photo book called the decisive moment it's the most iconic photo book and every photographer who came after him has studied his work and his photo book and if you haven't picked up that book i can highly recommend it and i'll put a link in the description to the decisive moment by anna kinchier person we just replicated the photograph me and my mom did when i was this tall right over here when a guard kicked me away say you cannot take photos here that's why i look so depressed you can see the one we just did and the other one beside each other instead of watching me trying to break down how could she person and all the greats took their photographs in my series called how to take photos like you can actually watch the greats teach you themselves and that brings me to today's sponsor which is masters of photography and masters of photography is a website with a lot of premium photography courses by some of the greatest photographers alive and a lot of whom have been inspired by kache basson they have many courses but three of them who i would like to highlight one is steve curry's way of taking the street photography and documentary photography and the other one is joel merwitz and some of you may be already seen my video on how to take photos like joe if not i put a link in the description and the last one i would like to highlight is albert watson who has done more than 100 vote covers and it's all about studio photography and fashion photography it's high quality in-depth and a lot of practical tips and a lot higher production than what i'm doing here and i put a link in the description to master stuff photography so make sure to check it out it's worthwhile and you can get a couple of free lessons as well or give it as a gift to someone who cares about photography all right back to the video another characteristic of his photos is that he didn't use flash and it was very popular at his time and the reason why he didn't use splash is that he thought it was barbaric to the photograph and it killed the emotion so no flash today not that i usually use flash so when looking at his work you see he's very well traveled and he's been to many different countries and many different interesting cities i'm gonna be in a new city in a new country soon and when i go on google maps and look for cities we always see these common photos whenever you search for copenhagen on google images you just see the background that i'm standing behind so whenever you try to find your next city try to look for blogs or photo books or anything that can give you a better impression of how the city actually is instead of looking at the common images on google maps because then you'll just see copenhagen like this and there's much more to it as you will see in this video we're making today [Music] this is so tricky i don't know if i have a single photo that i care about to be honest and my challenge is for you guys to do the same as i'm doing right now to try to imitate katja person and then use the hashtag tpl croissant as you see here like take photos like brazon and then let's see what you got because this is not easy but we will continue to make our best effort but it's also very normal i think that we don't take our best photos while we try to step so much out of what we normally do like if we just go and do what we're really good at and what works for us usually we're not going to move much are we [Music] by looking at this photograph you see here i don't think it's carried by this decisive moment at all i think it's carried with someone who has a background in arts and painting and geometry and composition i think it's a lot more difficult to learn how to see how he sees in terms of the way he focuses on composition than it is to learn how to force the decisive moment and have your finger on the trigger [Music] hola [Music] [Music] line [Music] hey that's a mess [Music] [Music] we're gonna wrap it up here i hope you enjoyed it and in the description i put links to previous videos in this episode that you can watch and please let me know which photographers you would like to see me cover in the future what do you say to people who call you the greatest photographer of the 20th century thank you goodbye

Channel: Frederik Trovatten

Views: 291,852

Rating: 4.9352098 out of 5

Keywords: henri cartier bresson, photography, film photography, trovatten, henri cartier-bresson, street photography

Id: OD4hCqORK60

Length: 20min 44sec (1244 seconds)

Published: Tue May 25 2021