After attending a wedding yesterday and staying over night in San Francisco, we had a few hours at our leisure before we decided to drive home. I thought it was time to check out if I could do some street photography.

For a landscape photographer, street photos is a whole new ball game. Landscape and streets (urban landscapes) couldn't be more different. The streets are in a constant flux and beautiful shots come together and vanish in less then a second.

In this post I will summarize some of the experiences I had and give you some tips in case you want to try this yourself. But let me say one thing up front, I liked this a whole lot and I will do a lot more candid photography in the future.

Why does Street Photography fascinate people?

Unlike landscape photography, street photography gives us the possibility to share a fleeting moment of someone's live. The photographer freezes time and documents urban life, something we are more accustomed to. The photographs generally tell a story. The frame becomes a window that lets us experience that moment. The photography style is related to documentary photography and the photographer is forgiven mistakes (blurry, tilts, distracting elements) as we recognize the fast action, making it impossible for to adjust everything before taking the photo.

Challenges

The challenge with this photography style is to observe the action around you and act fast. You need to be completely aware of everything that is going on around you, as you are part of the scene. You are interacting with your subjects to some degree (the lesser the better, as we don't want them to be aware of the camera). Scenes come together in split seconds and disappear. You need your camera to be ready and react before the subject even realizes what is going on.

At the same time you need to be on a constant look for interesting action. Where is something happening? Who are the interesting people?

Simply firing away at people doesn't quite cut it (unless the people are very interesting subjects in themselves). Trying to tell a story with fast action shots is the real challenge (more on this in a later article).

The main obstacle to overcome was my shy nature. Getting up close with a SLR into someone's face and snapping a photograph takes some guts (my Canon 20D shutter makes a pretty loud noise). I used a wide to normal lens, that required me to get fairly close, but is far less intimidating in case I am recognized. I only had a few hours today, so I tried to jump right in. The more confident I grew, the less people noticed me and the easier it became. Surprisingly I was completely invisible to most people, despite my gear and my obvious interest in them. It was almost surreal what happened here.

Some people did recognize what I did, but I smiled at them or kept looking and photographing in the direction they came from. Not a single person got mad or even gave me a stinky look. Only one person turned away and some people asked if I could photograph them too (which I happily did, although I have no use for posed photographs).

To 95% of my subjects I was invisible. A part of the scenery or maybe just a minor annoyance.

Below are a few more shots, but to see the rest you will have to wait a week or two until I have thrown up the gallery.

One thing is for sure though, I will be doing a lot more of this in the future.

We started our adventure in Chinatown and after a couple of hours headed to fishermans wharf where we parked the car for 50 minutes to take more photos.

This guy was probably contemplating what he should eat in the restaurant behind him.

Oh Joy. The Image has been cross processed (in case you were wondering about the colors).

For some of us, even basic survival is a day to day challenge. It is the less fortunate that we turn away from and that we avoid instead of giving them a smile and a friendly word.

I hope I got you interested in this. Come back soon and check out the complete gallery.