STREET PHOTOGRAPHY TIPS – Shooting with CREATIVE CONSTRAINTS in Downtown Zurich

[Music] welcome back lovely members I am joined today by a special guest with me here in downtown Zurich is the right honorable Leah clar who you all know from our uh community at viewfinder Mastery and those of you who are familiar with Leah's work will know that Leah is our resident Maestro of street photography and uh and so I am with her today to learn a few things and work on a unique challenge this month which is called creative constraints uh basically the idea with creative constraints is that we put some limitations on ourselves and that sort of helps us just get started and helps us actually jump start our creativity in a way so the idea here today is Leah is working on a creative constraint of her own um and that is anonymity anonymity so I'm going to try to walk around and find strange people not strange people just strangers with strange things covering their faces oh wow okay now that is a challenge for sure I'm going to work on something slightly different I'm basically going to pretend today that I'm photographing with my dream camera which is a hustel blood swc 903 and I'll put a picture of that camera on screen right now it's a very obscure and very old hustle blood camera that um basically shoots black and white and only in square format so that's something that I don't do very often myself so I thought it'd be kind of a fun creative constraint to work on the idea is basically just to you know think about what we're shooting before we actually get out in the field and start uh clicking away to give ourselves a little bit of um you know direction for lack of a better description so that's what we're doing I'm going to set up my camera now with that square black and white uh format and Leah do you have any tips for us as we kick off our shoot here uh well street photography I always use uh the tip of turning off my shutter noise so people can't really see that I'm coming up near them you like to sneak up on people stealthy okay and uh my other tip is to shoot from the hip if you don't want to get too close to people you can just kind of walk by nonchalantly and shoot away and you probably get some Keepers very cool okay staying Incognito is kind of a kind of a crucial part of street photography I guess without further Ado here we're going to get our cameras set up and I'm going to tail Leah around town and we're going to get creative I'm excited let's do it yeah perfect here we go there aspect ratio got it my first step in this process was figuring out how to set my camera up so that it actually mimics the S SW c903 so to do that I needed to set my aspect ratio to 1 by one so I get the square image format and of course set the picture profile to black and white and to make my own challenge a little bit more interesting I'm going to tape my zoom lens in place at 21 mm because this is the closest representation of the fixed lens that comes on the old hustle blood swc 903 okay so I'm all set to go but actually what I want to find out is what Leah is actually on the lookout for as she photographs anonymity so I am looking for peculiar weird objects um not like an ugly sign or like a you know something you'd see every day to cover someone's face something really happens stce like maybe someone's popping out an umbrella or opening a newspaper in front of their face so we're on the lookout it's very tough one of the very first things that impressed me about the way Leah shoots is that she's just constantly pointing her camera at different subjects she doesn't even second guess herself she just walks right up frames up the shot takes it and doesn't think twice so I'm trying to use this um moped mirror to possibly cover someone's face as they're approaching me but it's really hard cuz now I'm having to fiddle with the aperture to make sure I get everything in Focus cuz I'm quite close [Music] up one thing's for sure and that is that street photography will really test your boldness when it comes to pointing your camera at strangers in public not only that but you've got to compose really quickly and respond to opportunities that just pop up and are gone in an instant as I followed Leah around taking my Square black and white 21 mm hustle blood shots I started to realize that I was missing a lot of cool moments just by fiddling around with my camera settings So eventually I just decided to leave the camera in aperture priority mode at f6.3 and just focus on capturing moments rather than having the perfect settings for every shot so this is cool because I can use the back of somebody's head to cover another person's face it's kind of a cool Technique No they caught on to me as I left the stairs which is fine they they gave me a little smile sometimes you're not so lucky though I've had people approach me and get kind of angry but it's just part of the business on the street that's very true and even though we have every right to be out and about photographing in the public space there are going to be certain people who just don't want to have their pictur you're taken and that's okay our best suggestion in those cases is to not make an issue out of it and just move on and find another subject so I get really excited when I walk into a really busy area of town and there's a ton of people around I tend to just start shooting from the hip like mad and I just hold it down low and just rapid fire away while I'm walking and a lot of times when you get home to your computer and look at all your shots you can get really lucky because you might have caught someone's hand brushing in front of someone's face or some other element that you didn't even um think about in the moment it's very cool it's a lucky shot I wanted to practice shooting from the hip myself so as Leah returned to her anonymity task I started looking for a situation where I could apply this Incognito method of capturing a candid moment on the street without even looking through my [Music] camera [Music] speaking of incognito photography take notice of this woman who's standing in her shop doorway before Leah lays down this next tip so whenever there's a door frame or a doorway I'm always curious if there's someone standing in there you can move yourself around to get the perfect shot if you're trying to conceal some part of their body or this is a great example right here [Music] got it [Music] up so I saw the birds down there and for anonymity I thought it would be perfect if one of the birds would have flown in front of someone's faces but I don't think I was that lucky today sometimes you just have to stand there and wait until you get the perfect shot [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] so after a long time out shooting in the city you can tend to lose your momentum you get kind of frustrated if you're out looking for something really particular and it's not hitting you in those cases I just throw caution to the wind go to a busy place like here in par plots where there's a ton of colorful characters and just shoot just walk around and don't be afraid don't be afraid if people approach you just walk around shoot from the hip if you're not comfortable you're going to be super surprised when you get home and look at all your uh files on the computer I promise [Music] amazing this ladder it's come back it's my friend so walking around town today guys I figured out that I picked a really difficult constraint for myself and there were times I got super frustrated walking around looking for weird objects sometimes you don't find anything you just have to get creative and stick to it just keep going Matt how did did you end up with your creative constraint oh good question well I definitely enjoyed uh shooting with my hustle blood uh swc 903 I had a lot of fun working with the just the general constraint of shooting square and shooting in black and white and I did get some shots that I'm pretty pretty happy with it's then the best I love it so that was just a part of one of our fun monthly photo assignments that we send out to our amazing members at viewfinder mastery.com and if you want to be challenged by Fun monthly photo assignments then come and check us out and join our membership you'll get valuable professional feedback from our team plus you'll get access to our entire library of quality online courses so join us to have fun to be challenged and to get feedback on your work and to learn from the team at viewfinder Mastery thanks for watching and we will see you over at viewfinder mastery.com [Music] [Music]

Channel: Viewfinder Mastery

Views: 5,429

Keywords: street photography, street photography tips, street photography ideas, sony 24-105 f4, photography sony, creative photography ideas, creative street photography, viewfinder mastery, shoot from the hip, creative photography exercises, how to do street photography, photos of people in public, photographing people in public, street photographer, street photographer in action, Zurich street photography, Switzerland photography, Juleah Claar photographer, sony street photography

Id: jL6vGB1CkDs

Length: 10min 37sec (637 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 12 2024