How to get CLOSER to people to IMPROVE your street photography

one of the questions we get asked a lot in photography particularly from new street photographers is how do you get close to your subjects there seems to be this unwritten rule in photography that if you want to improve your pictures the best thing you can do is actually physically move closer to whatever it is you're photographing the famous robert kappa quote if your pictures aren't good enough you aren't close enough really underlines this thinking and this concept within the industry as a whole but what did kappa actually mean by closeness is it just a physical

closeness whereby you reduce the distance between you and the subject or is there another type of closeness an emotional closeness based on a relationship or an empathy or an understanding of the subject either way incorporating physical closeness and emotional closeness can improve your photographs and in this video i want to show you how our photographs have improved by using these two concepts i'm actually quite a standoffish photographer i'm not that comfortable engaging with people on the street i'm not very happy talking to strangers people i don't know and i'm always wary of any sort of

confrontation and while i've adapted ways of taking photographs which avoid any sort of confrontation with people on the street i was getting bored with taking the images that i was taking my images would very much be pictures of little figures in an environment and i would set a scene with my camera sort the composition out the framing and then i would wait a few minutes until somebody walked through that scene and a lot of times the people in the photographs were there just to fill up a space within a composition i decided that i really

wanted to change the way that i was taking photographs the real catalyst for change came when sarah started shooting with me around eight years ago and her street photographs even though we were on the same street even though we were often no more than 50 60 feet away from each other her images had so much more life to them so much more energy they were full of character they were full of humor she was shooting a lot closer than i was she was seeing the world from their perspective and not from somebody that was standing

on the other side of the street i knew i had to get closer and because i'm very standoffish that that wasn't easy that's that was really quite a tough thing to do so i had to physically force myself to do that and i did it through changing focal lengths i went from a 50 millimeter which i'd use for virtually 25 years to a 35 millimeter and after i'd used the 35 for a long time and i was used to it i went to a 28 and then i used that for a while then i went

to a 24 used that for a while and then eventually i went to a 21 millimeter which is where i've been for the last 18 months now the main thing is when you're changing focal lengths you need to give each focal length a chance and what i mean by that is spend some time with it i don't mean take 35mm out on tuesday and the 20mm out on wednesday and the 24 hour on thursday i mean actually spending some quality time with each lens get to know the lens adapt your shooting habits and your field

of vision for that lens and then when you're okay with that lens then maybe it's time to move on to the next one by doing it this way it will take some time but ultimately you will get more and more comfortable at the closer distances that the lenses will force you to work at the other thing to remember is that when you start moving from i don't know standard lenses to sort of medium wide lenses like the 35 and then you start moving to 28 24 and even 21. your first pictures will be absolute rubbish

you just want to discard them the trick is not to get discouraged you're changing completely the way that you look at the world and you have to get your eye and your brain and your coordination and everything used to that and my first pictures that i shot with at 24 or 21 were absolutely awful i was just too far away all the time and it would have been very easy at that point to have said you know i've gone out this afternoon for two or three hours i've come back with nothing i'm gonna go back

to what i was shooting previously that afternoon hasn't been wasted because you're racking up hours with that lens and the more time that you spend with that lens the better your pictures will be sarah uses the other sense of closeness a lot in her work this idea that you create a relationship with the subject before you photograph them the documentary work in particular is based on her ability to get access to the people that she wants to photograph she'll spend days chatting to people before even getting involved in actually taking pictures just to gain their

trust so that she can go and do the pictures that she wants to actually go and do [Music] now when it comes to street photography she does the same thing obviously she does it in seconds rather than days but she gains their trust by being herself and she's a very outgoing person she will talk to anybody she can strike up a conversation with anybody and she's genuinely interested in what other people have to say and what they do if you take a look at our pov videos particularly sarah's video of her shooting in brighton you

can see how effective this can be she'll stand with somebody or a group of people just taking their photographs and they don't even care that she's there doing that and that's something that she's worked on over the years now sarah originally when she started in photography wanted to take pictures which showed character and humor the soul of the people that were in the photograph and she knew she had to go and get close in order to get these photographs and as she started to engage in people more the photographs got better and better [Music] [Music]

if you're the type of person that's unhappy with your photography at the moment then yeah maybe robert kappa was right maybe your pictures aren't good enough in your eyes because you aren't close enough and maybe just doing one or both of these two things either get physically closer to your subject or emotionally close to your subject might just help you to break out of a rut or change your direction or actually give you far more satisfaction as a photographer and ultimately being happy with your photographs is the number one thing that we should all be

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