BRIANW

By BRIANW

Stranger Things (Hold My Hand), Maidstone

Lately I've been watching way too many street photography You Tube videos than is good for me but what they have taught me is that there is no right way or wrong way to approach how you take your images. Some photographers only shoot with a shallow depth of field, some only shoot on sunny days stopped down to f11 or f16, some mainly shoot from the hip, some "fish", some "hunt", some use ICM (I didn't know this was short for "Intentional Camera Movement"), some only shoot with a 28mm and lots of layers, some love silhouettes, some love flash with daylight and some love shoving their camera in people's faces (this is definitely not for me). All of them have their pros and cons and some depend on the photographer's personality - they are all equally valid in their own ways but I really think that their should be no hierarchy in what constitutes the "correct" way to take your street photographs.
What I have seen as a preponderance on the channel, as regards street photography, is a lot of young male Leica users (I have nothing against Leicas but they are very expensive and most people cannot afford one so they should also not be upheld as some sort of superior badge of honour by certain cohorts of photographer (I'm mainly talking about You Tubers who've just spent £6,000 on a new mode - how they hell do they afford one!l)) who "hunt" their images in New York and London with a wide angle lens and mention that are "award winning" or show the same images over and over again (Matt Stuart, Martin Parr, Bruce Gilden and Dougie Wallace (the last two being rude, shove the camera in your face flash merchants) being prime examples of those who hog this genre of photography. So I wanted to highlight a brilliant female photographer who uses a similar technique to the Bruce and the Dougie but does it with a poetic, fluid and much less aggressive approach. It's one of Paulie B's best ever videos and is about the truly wonderful photographer Francesca Chiacchio, so see the link below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-TAt_cXL7w

I have no idea why she isn't better known as her photography is breathtakingly good and I simply don't understand why street photography has been so dominated by the male perspective.
Now I've had a wee bit of a rant (sorry about that) I'll get back to today's image which was a shot from the hip using zone focusing. I've often dismissed this way of shooting but I now realise it's a skill just like any other way of taking a street photograph. As I've not practised it much I'm pretty terrible at it but on this one occasion it worked out well. I saw this mother and daughter holding hands and that she was wearing a Stranger Things t-shirt. I've only watched very brief glimpses of this programme and found it terrifying so the holding hands resonated with me a lot!

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