Taking street portraits. Few tips and a new challenge.

I am not sure how many of you are street photographers but i am sure there are a few on Steemit. The rest seems to have one or another phobia regarding street photography so i will try to provide a few tips in this post and make a new challenge to see what comes out of it and if any of you will be able to overcome it.

First things first.

Most people like their pictures to be taken. Let's say 80% of them. The rest 19% will say they do not but still will feel flattered when right approach is used and they are asked if a portrait could be taken. But let's leave this for latter and more advanced techniques.

Covert Ops

If you have never done street photography that might be the first technique you might want to try. Take a small camera something like Sony a6300 or similar. Mount a wide angle lens on it lets say a kit lens of 16-50. This set up will allow you to do a completely "blind" shots as no one will even suspect that you taking images.

Put a camera in a way most tourists do: sash on your neck and camera hanging on your chest level. Now you can walk around in the streets pretending to be a tourist keeping you finger on a shutter release and snapping pictures as you go. Streets are usually noisy and nobody will even hear your shutter going of. You may look completely other way from your subject and shoot general direction at 16mm. When you get better you might even want to make that indifferent, confused or lost tourist face pretending you are interested in architecture. Changes you will get caught are 1 in a 1 000 000 or so. Another nice thing is this way you will get the most candid and unique shots that are very hard to reproduce any other way.

Images taken with Sony a6300 and 16-50mm kit lens.

When you feel more comfortable you can try another trick and pretend you are messing with a camera settings or reviewing images while standing on a busy sidewalk and letting subjects come to you. This way you will have more control of composition. Just do not make sudden camera movements as the matrix will get suspicious.

Try to maintain a relatively high shutter speed of 1/500 or more since you will be on the move and you do not want them to be blurry.

Sniper

If you are a total paranoiac and scared of people you can use distance as an ally. That will involve a good zoom lens so you also need to be a richer motherfucker to afford one. I used to be and had Nikkor 70-200 VR II on a Nikon D3s body that did the job very well. Now i am using Sony A7RII with Zeiss 55 (thanks to upvotes from Steem community) and since it has 42Mpx sensor i can crop in later in post and still have enough resolution. Nikon D3s was 12Mpx so i had to use 200MM lens but 48Mpx packs x4 pixels so i can achieve the same distance/magnification with 55mm just fine.

The rest is kind of self explanatory, you pick your victim and shoot. From greater distance there is no way they can tell that they are the subject precisely. Sometime they get a bit suspicious, but if you keep camera to your face after they have noticed you of even tilt it sideways as if looking for a frame they get relaxed pretty soon. Even if they do not, with a bulky camera like Nikon D3s you will still cover up the bigger portion of your face (unless you have a really huge face) and will remain incognito.

Nikon D3s with Nikkor 70-200 VR II

Sony A7RII Zeis 55mm Full Ress and cropped in.

Now that concludes the basic training. Now get any gear available and try it on the street as practice makes it perfect. Soon enough you will overcome your phobia and will start talking to people occasionally.

The highest level for any street photographer is getting people consensus for the portrait to be taken, but that might require some time. Since i am not very fond of majority of people in general, i rarely apply this technique, but if i find a subject interesting and sensible person i ask for a permission to take a portrait and of course make sure to take his/her email to send the resulting image later. Make notes not to send the wrong one thought.

So go out there and take some street photography if you have balls for that. Use #streetchallenge tag for that as i am interested if anyone will actually do this and if all time to create this post was not done in vain. Every now and then you will get a face like that, but who give a fuck about stupid people. Street photography is a very exciting genre. Just STAY SAFE lol

And of course, resteem this post if you found it usefull. And definitely share the results on www.bescouted.com The first photography community on Steem blockchain.

Post inspired by and dedicated to @davekavanagh so i am waiting for some results at least from you mate.

David