Inside Street Photography

Street photography is having a big hype recently, probably thanks to everyone carrying a camera inside their phones and we being now so used to have people shooting at us without getting nervous about it.

There also has been a great throw back of bnw photography and I was got into it too.Instagram is filled with excellent bnw feeds, especially street photography focused, and after being following some of them for some time and publishing one of mine, I kind of recognized a common language, elements that are unique to this particular form of art.

Some of these elements derive from the characteristics of bnw photography and can be found in common artistic photography; we'll see what I think these are. Others are really specific and come from the usual things that we encounter while in the streets.

I've tried to collect examples of these common elements and I'll present them classified in several categories.

We'll also understand why street photography takes great advantage from using bnw over color.

This is an example from my recent Instagram account dedicated to street photography.

We rush, He waits. . . . #buddha #silhouette #peace #rome #visualsoflife #creativelenses #culture #streetphoto #ourstreets #exploretocreate #streetscape #fromstreetswithlove #ig_captures #blackandwhite #bnw #thesestreets #street_focus_on #street_leaks #street_photo_club #urban #streetbw #streetlife_award #inspiredeye #streetshot #shotzmag #vivostreet #urban_shots #streetphoto_bw #urbex #city

A post shared by Roberto Longobardi (@keep.yr.eyes.on.the.road) on Apr 9, 2017 at 1:31am PDT

Black and white photography

You may think that removing color from an image is like killing it. In the end, we live in a colorful world, we like flowers, blue skies and sunsets, and colors can give images an immense power if used correctly.
On the other hand, too many or dissonant colors can ruin a well framed image.

So removing colors from an image actually hides a big part of it, but it also reveals new and equally powerful elements; it removes noise and let you receive other signals that were otherwise submerged into it.

Of course, you must compensate for the lack of color with other strong elements that can give power to the image and make it interesting.

I think these elements can be:

• shape
• light
• contrast
• perspective
• patterns
• the subject

For example, silhouettes provide shape, light and contrast together, let alone an interesting subject, and this makes me understand why they are so popular in bnw photography. If the silhouette is at the end of a tunnel, additionally, you also add perspective and make it even more interesting. BTW, tunnels are among the most frequent elements I found in street photography.

So, we've seen that colors are powerful elements in your images, as long as you can control them, and how too many or dissonant colors can instead represent a disturbing noise, which can distract the eyes from the subjects we want to focus. This is particularly true in street photography, where images are taken on the fly to moving and often unaware subjects. There's not even time to frame the picture properly, imagine taking into account the colorful garbage in the green trashcans, those red and yellow posters and that light blue shop sign above.

This is why street photography benefits so much from black and white: it helps you focus the image on the elements you can control most, and to remove those you can't.

So, based on the elements that make a strong black and white image, street photographers have created a language that is specific to the world they live and walk into. They have applied those principles to the subjects and scenery you can encounter in your everyday life.In the next post we'll start taking a look at the names and verbs of this language.

In the next post, we begin diving into the elements of bnw street photograpy, starting with subjects, and in particular people.