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Street photography
Why even masters turn to the street

Rising up from the heat, dust and pedestrian commonality of the street is perhaps the most truthful form of photography. Although shooting candidly on the streets is inherently documentary, it can capture moments so precious the end result is often elevated to art.

Although the most simple, shooting in the streets can also be the most difficult. People are constantly moving, the street could be full of harsh light and dark shadows, and the moments you would love to capture don't announce themselves. It's all hit and miss.

Beyond yourself
Shooting other people without them posing for you – they may even be unaware they are being photographed – comes with obvious difficulties. One of the most common fear people have about taking out a camera in a souq, for example, is of the entire market coming to a standstill, everyone looking at the photographer. Instead, you'll find that most people either don't notice you, mind or care.

That's when you realise that the problem is not the people being shot, it's really you. That fear of being noticed or singled out is more about your perception of the situation than the actual ground reality. One instinctive escape is to shoot from far away, using a telephoto lens. But such photographs usually look too flat, and it's obvious that however good the subject is, you were not a part of it. To go beyond such bystander views, you have to be in the action, a true part of the moment. Forget about blending in, camouflage or excuses. You'll be so close your subject will stumble over your wide angle lens.

How then will you get shots that look natural, if you're poking a huge lens in the subject's face? You can't just walk in, brandish a camera and make your exit with a portfolio in hand. You have to spend time with your subject, get him comfortable, and be a part of the action. After a while you'll be one of them, a participant. Your subjects will accept you, and that's real blending in – not trying to hide behind a telephoto from across the street, pretending to photograph something else or literally 'shooting from the hip.' And remember, the more natural and open you are, the more your subjects will understand what you're doing.

Speed
Shooting candid shots of people might require faster film speed settings, for subjects move, unlike landscapes, and they're sometimes at their most interesting in low light conditions, like shady cafés or inner-city streets. If you're using a film camera you'll have to buy a faster film, e.g. ISO 400 instead of the usual 100. For extreme
situations like concerts or shooting hand-held at night, you'd be better off at 1600 or above. Even digital cameras have so-called film speed settings – the higher the ISO the more sensitive the sensor or film is to light. The trade-off is that the higher the ISO the greater the film grain, or digital noise. What you choose depends on the situation and the look you're comfortable with.

Blur is a bad thing only in an insipid academic sort of way. Learn to use it to your advantage. Incorporating just the right amount of blur might add drama to your image, while a razor sharp image might look unnatural. There are no rules.

Equipment
If you're walking through streets and trying to blend in, you don't want a huge box camera on a tripod. You need something small and light. It is no wonder then that the birth of some of the greatest street photography coincided with the rise of the Leica rangefinder: a small wonder immortalised by people like Henri Cartier-Bresson. This French photographer practically invented street photography, and he would roam the streets of Paris through the 1930s armed with this discreet little camera. To be even less obtrusive, he would cover its metallic surface with black tape so it wouldn't reflect light in the sun. As we'd mentioned in our previous article, what really sealed his reputation as one of the greatest photographers ever was his philosophy about what he called the decisive moment. It was, in his own words, "The simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as the precise organisation of forms which gives that event its proper expression."

The decisive moment
By 1932, at age 24, Cartier-Bresson had begun to devise a whole new manner of shooting pictures. He displayed an intuitive knack for choosing the decisive moment, that instant when a shutter click can suspend an event within the eye and heart of the beholder, an exhilarating confluence of observer and observed. His lyrical, loose, ingeniously composed images were a revelation. Previously, most photographers had used clunky, stationary cameras. They were like Romantic poets who looked back at time, recording the melancholy of a moment's having passed. Cartier-Bresson's images, many plucked from the everyday whirl of his beloved Paris, had power and poetry. He said, "I am a pack of nerves while waiting for the moment, and this feeling grows and grows and grows and then it explodes, it is a physical joy, a dance, space and time reunited. Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes!"

Cartier-Bresson's viewpoint was always that of the unseen observer, the 'fly on the wall', recording apparently without interaction with the subject. He trained himself to use his equipment – almost always a Leica rangefinder camera, usually with a standard 50mm lens – without having to look at its controls. He often hid it from view until the moment of exposure when it would rise rapidly to his eye. By using a single lens he was able to position himself exactly in the correct position.

It was his book Images a la Sauvette, better known by the title chosen by its American publishers, The Decisive Moment, that put his photography and ideas to a world-wide public. The French title uses the term for illegal street trading and could perhaps be translated as 'Images on the Run' or 'Stolen Images' and perhaps more accurately reflects the dynamism of Cartier-Bresson's better work than the more static suggestion of the 'decisive moment' which has however become indelibly linked with his photography.

Through it all, there has been the prevailing Cartier-Bresson ethic: instinct always triumphs over mind. "You mustn't know too much," he says, describing how he captures the decisive moment on film. "There's nothing to know. Cats know more than human beings on the subject. Intuition. People use brains too much."