Candid Street Photography

Street photography is very different from controlled, pre-meditated outdoor photography or studio photography for that matter. When you photograph candid subjects on the streets, you do not have all the time in the world to plan and execute a shot. Street photography is a rewarding past time, as you photograph and capture a moment of real life on your camera. Every street and candid image has a memory attached to it – the city street you were in, the mood at the moment subjectively and objectively, the mood of the people around you, the incidents before and after the image was photograph all make a candid photograph an imprint on the photographer’s memory, and on the memory of the audience that sees the image. Photojournalists all over the world roam the streets of their cities in search of that image that could tell a whole story. A photograph does speak a thousand words doesn’t it? Or at least so it should be where street photography is concerned. How many images can you remember about a famous event? Remember the photograph of a boy kneeling down beside JF Kennedy just after he was shot? US troops raising their country’s flag on Iwogima as a symbol of victory? The ‘Afghan Girl’ photograph from National Geographic? A sailor kissing a nurse after WWII ended? All these images have become imprinted on people’s minds as symbolic of the whole events that they were used to describe. That’s what a good journalistic photograph is all about, and that’s what you hope to capture when you go outdoors with the purpose of capturing a lively moment.

Working as a journalistic photographer, however may not always be as exciting as the above paragraph may lead one to believe. We don’t mean to discourage anybody, but do understand that you cannot start off at the top of the rung! As with any other form of photography, one may need to assist an established professional for many months before he or she is handed the responsibility of photographing an important event by the editor! Also, the competition is fierce…it is all very well to read success stories of levi-clad photographers “camera-slung-around-the-neck” and making it big in LIFE magazine, but those were the days when photojournalism was just being given shape as an important part of news reporting as we know it today. That is not to say those photographers just got lucky breaks. On the contrary, they were giving shape to something that we follow today, and making a path as we all know, is much more of a job than following in one! If you want to truly be a photojournalist, you and are sure you do not want to be anything else, we believe that’s half the battle won!!!