Street photography is a broad category in photography, but in essence street photographers attempt to capture in an artistic, documentary fashion everyday sort of things in a candid manner as the photographer saw them with little or no manipulation to the image. The category is somewhat of a misnomer in that it is not restricted to streets–one could do such shooting at parks, malls, restaurants, stores, markets, and any other place where people gather  and interact.

I find this sort of photography to both fun and challenging because the sorts of shots taken are generally ad hoc  and otherwise unplanned. But the diversity does not mean one cannot apply some principles that will help one’s results better. So here are my tips:

1.) Shoot, Shoot, Shoot

You have quality…why not lots of quality? When I’m out on the town with my camera in hand, I shoot all sorts of stuff. I don’t like to waste shots, but nor am I afraid to take a picture of something I think might make an interesting photo. I remember when I got my first digital camera, I had to be selective, but now storage is cheap so I do not have to be as selective.

2.) Learn to aim the camera without looking through the view finder.

This for me was one of the hardest techniques to master, and I’m not really sure I’ve got it, but learning to point the camera towards a subject without looking through the viewfinder takes practice. I shoot from my chest and hip a lot, therefore I’ve practiced from these two points. Some times I like to get down low, but this is not always possible (as in this shot because the ground was soaked!), so I will stoop down and hold the camera close to the ground as this gives an interesting perspective.

3.) Learn to shoot from the hip….literally

After learning to aim the camera without looking through the viewfinder, another trick is to learn to position the camera on your body to help steady shots. I found that by positioning my camera on my hip, the shot seems to be more stable than holding it up to my eye. Camera shake seems to be more exaggerated if you hold the camera away from your body rather than close.

4.) Take advantage of your surroundings

Toting a tripod is not always possible, and when low light or long exposure come into play, you wish you had one. But with streets,  there are an abundance of items to use: tables, benches, chairs, posts, rails, window seals, rocks, stumps, or even the ground can help stable your shot. Also shooting from these heights can make an otherwise uninteresting shot interesting because of the perspective. If I’m out doing this sort of photography, I usually only take a body with one lens, an extra battery, and extra memory and I leave the rest of the gear at home. Sometimes, I may carry a mini tripod or a bean bag to help support the camera, but now always.

5.) Don’t Delete Anything

I found that some of the most interesting shots I’ve taken aren’t interesting until I look at them on my computer and can process them a little.  Some nasty looking shots can actually turn out to be some pretty interesting stuff during post processing. Nowadays with cheap memory, you can be less discretionary about what you shoot!

6.) Don’t expect to shoot anything in particular

Rather than imagining what a particular shot should look like imagine shots of things around you. Experiment with a couple different things if the subject is stationary, but also be ready to grab something on a whim too.

There they are. If you want some inspiration, check out my gallery, Street Photography.

Pseudo high dynamic range photos are really nothing more than a single exposure processed as an HDR. There are other guides on how to do this but I am going to describe the process I’ve found that I think works pretty well, at least in my humble opinion. This little guide assumes nothing about software, but points out principles I think may help enhance your pseudo HDR experience.

The first thing you’ll want to do is select or take a good candidate photo for processing.

• A good candidate photo should be well exposed—that is there are not a lot of blacked out or burned out spots on the image. HDR images attempt to prevent this from happening by merging images together. Just about any image that is well exposed can be used, although you may be able to get away with a poorly exposed image.
  • If you look at the tone curve below, you see two peaks and a valley. If the tone curve contains peaks or valleys that are flat, then the image is probably blacked out or burned out.
  • Most cameras nowadays have a way to see the tone curve while you are shooting the image, or right after you’ve shot the image.
• If possible, shoot the photo in a RAW format so that the camera does not do any processing to the image.
• You’ll want a low ISO too.

I shot this image at as a RAW file at ISO 100. This is the image with no processing save a resize and conversion to a JPEG, but even conversion to a JPEG does  alter it some.

Pseudo HDR Original Image

Flat Tone Curve

The next step you’ll want to do is to “flatten” the image. An image that is flat is an image that seems to lack contrast such that the colors look washed out. The human eye has a tendency to gravitate towards localized contrast, and images that don’t have such are typically described as flat. RAW images right off a camera almost always look flat without some sort of post processing. Images converted to JPEG usually go through some sort of algorithm to make the image look more natural, typically done by adding more contrast. The white line represents the bias by which the photo processing software is altering the photo. This line is straight (i.e. flat) while the human eye sees things in more of an “S” shape with the line flattening out at the top and bottom.

• If your image is flat already, you may not need to do any post processing.
• If the image has light and dark areas you may want do some post processing to flatten the image more.
• Add fill light if there are dark spots. You may want to decrease the overall contrast of the image and tweak the brightness some.
• If the image was shot at a high ISO, you’ll probably want to run a noise reduction algorithm to smooth this out some. Some HDR processes can really expose noise even at low ISOs.

Pseudo HDR Flattened Image

Once the image is flat, you’ll want to save it as a 16 bit TIFF or something that supports a higher bit range than 8 bit because tone mapping attempts to compress higher dynamic range images into lower range images, typically by reducing the color information. 16 bit TIFF files store enough information for most modern cameras.

After saving the image, you can process it like any other image that was produced using HDR, so fire up you’re HDR program and start tweaking the image with tone mapping!

Pseudo HDR Image

After I ran this image through Qtpfsgui (a free HDR workflow), I rotated and cropped it some to come up with this image.

Pseudo HDR Final Image

Final Image

There is something about shooting waterfalls that is a lot of fun…Maybe it is because I like to hike around in the woods, and the waterfalls themselves are the endpoint, or maybe it is just the pure beauty of the falls themselves. Whatever it is, I do enjoy it. There are plenty of guides on how to do shoot waterfalls and HDR, so I felt I’d combine two and add my two cents to the collection of wisdom.

First, a little jargon: A High Dynamic Rance image contains more information than image sensors are capable of collecting. The dynamic range of a sensor refers to the range of light intensity a sensor can detect. For any given sensor, any light brighter than the range the sensor can detect is interpreted as white, and anything darker as black. You may have noticed that when taking pictures indoors during the day, windows appear to be white in a picture, but with your eye you can distinguish objects outside and inside. This is because the dynamic range of the human eye is greater than that of a camera. An HDR image is a combination of multiple images taken at different shutter speeds that are then combined to create an image with more dynamic range than the sensor can detect in any single image. HDR softeware combines the well exposed elements of each photo while removing the overexposed and underexposed elements. After the HDR is created, software then attempts to tone map the image–that is compress the HDR image into a form that is usable for print or on-screen display, as both print media and screens like sensors can only display a limited dynamic range less than what the human eye can see.

Waterfalls offer a particularly great opportunity for using HDR, as it is often times difficult to properly expose waterfalls such that the water is not “burned out” or “blown out” (that is completely white) and the content around the water fall is not utterly black or so dark one cannot see it anyways. HDR’s offer a great solution to this as you can expose the white water and the surrounding content and combine these elements for some beautiful landscape photography. So with no further adieu, we’ll begin.

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