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Street photography

from Akor (eye@kaax.org)

OK, so explain to me why street photography has to be 'in your face'.

Well, first of all there was a smiley there. But still, street photography was brought into prominence by people like Henry Cartier-Bresson who used 50mm lens which necessitated being in someone's face in order to get decent pictures. Remember the famous Robert Capa's dictum? "If you don't like your pictures, get closer".

There are obvious technical problems to shooting street scenes from afar: telephotos are big, heavy, and conspicuous; it's hard to hand-hold them and a tripod restricts your mobility and makes you yet more conspicuous.

By the way, medium telephotos (100-200mm) still force you to be in someone's face if you want that face to fill the frame. My point was that this (and other similar photos) were made possible by a set of fairly unusual circumstances: (1) The lens could zoom out to 400mm so I could stay far away; (2) The lens was IS so I could hand-hold; (3) This was a street festival/carnival/procession/etc. so there were a few photogs around and people were not (well, not all that) self-conscious about being photographed.

Anyway, I would probably argue that the genre of these images is candid portraits and not street photography. Street photography shows people in context and in this case I was concentrating on just faces.

(posted 8333 days ago)

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