Street Photography

If I had to sum up what it is that makes street photography so much fun, the closest I could get would be flow. Much of my other work is the result of careful and often obsessive focus on the technical details of a shot. Exposure is the result of a half-dozen considerations in how I metered the scene. The framing has been tweaked and then tweaked again. This attention to detail gets results, but the experience is tainted by the fact that my attention is as much on the camera as what is in front of it. Street photography does not abide by this. Street work demands that you don’t think, you just act. Your only tool is the focus you put into noticing the beauty of things before they are gone and finding what Henri Cartier-Bresson called “the decisive moment”; when a single picture tells a whole story. Your camera melts away and suddenly it’s just you on a walk, respecting the light, and stealing little tokens of beautiful moments that will never happen the same way again. When I start out on these photo-walks I often recite a quote that gets me in the right headspace.

“The object isn’t to make art,

it’s to be in that wonderful state

which makes art inevitable”

- Robert Henri