What Street Photography Taught Me About Getting Out of My Own Way

What Street Photography Taught Me About Getting Out of My Own Way

I shoot in a controlled environment for a living. Every light in my studio has a strip of masking tape on it with a name. I have a custom app on my phone for drawing lighting diagrams. When a new modifier arrives, I test it the same day it shows up at my door. I built my career on the idea that photography is something you engineer. So when a street photographer made me genuinely reconsider the way I think about images, I paid attention.

Reading Light in Hostile Territory: What Street Photography Taught Me About Seeing

Reading Light in Hostile Territory: What Street Photography Taught Me About Seeing

Most of my working life happens inside four walls with light I’ve placed myself. I know exactly where every photon is coming from. Street photography is the opposite of that, and for years I kept a comfortable distance from it. But lately I’ve been thinking more seriously about how I observe people in uncontrolled environments, partly because it feeds my editorial eye, and partly because the compositional instincts you build on the street are impossible to develop any other way.