STREET PHOTOGRAPHY
The way you set up your camera can have a dramatic effect on the way your street pictures will look and the atmosphere and messages they convey, says Damien Demolder
Cameras have been clever enough for a long time that when pointed in the right direction with all the controls set to auto, they can produce a well-exposed image with the right thing in focus all by themselves. And if your aim is to just simply record, in a factual manner, the likeness of the scene in front of you, your time might be better spent in some activity other than understanding the difference between f/1.4 and f/11. If, however, you want more than a physical likeness of the streets around you, and you want to demonstrate the emotion, atmosphere, excitement and dynamism of the world and the people in it, it pays to know how your camera and lens settings can help you to do that.
Pictures taken in auto modes tend not to have the power to say very much or to direct the viewer to the parts of the scene you consider interesting, which is fine if you don’t find anything interesting about the scene you are shooting. If though something has made you stop and look, and look enough that you can see a masterpiece emerging from the bustle of the street, you will know what you want to highlight, how you want to present that element, and what you want the viewer to see first when they look at your image. If so, you will need to think about why your lens offers over 20 aperture settings when you can only use one at a time.
Effects of different apertures
I’m going to start with discussing apertures as they are the main drivers behind my camera settings when shooting street scenes. The aperture value itself is not as important as the depth of field it creates – no one will know which f-stop you used but they will see the effect that setting creates in the picture and how it controls the way they see the subject – so I aim for an aperture that creates a definite visual effect. These tend to be at the extremes of the range: I like f/1.4 the most for its dramatic pull of the eye and its isolating effect on the subject, and f/16 or f/22 will render the whole scene in spectacular and graphic detail. In street photography I don’t have much use for the ‘safe’ apertures like f/5.6, as they tend to produce a result that is reliable but unexciting.
The best apertures of any lens are those in the middle of the range. From a scientific standpoint that is almost always true – this is where resolution, contrast, vignetting, and edge aberrations are most favourable to the technical quality of your pictures. Street photographers, however, aren’t scientists. They are artists, and we value the visual and emotional appeal of an image much more highly than the line pairs per millimetre that can be recorded. Undoubtedly, the widest and smallest apertures of any lens tend
