What Landscape Photographers Can Learn from Street Photographers
What Landscape Photographers Can Learn from Street Photographers
Street photography is something I have always been interested in since I started to make photographs. Even though I am a landscape photographer at heart, it’s the way that street photographers go about their creative process. A camera, a lens, and the environment around them, it’s the most pure form of photography in a sense. If you don’t know what street photography is then I highly suggest exploring it for a bit. But in a nutshell, the street photographer takes the mundane, simple scenes in their local street and reduces them down into something simple and aesthetically beautiful. Often, street photographers like to work in busy chaotic streets so that they have a variety of subjects (people passing by) to work with. It’s in that finding of compositions within chaotic scenes is a practiced skill street photographers possess and landscape shooters can learn from.
A Street Photographers Biggest Strength
How do street photographers find compositions in the chaos? Simple, its called simplification! Simplification is a street photographers greatest super power, in short, its the process of eliminating unnecessary things in your frame. I would argue that street photographers practice this more so than any other type of photographer. I think they inherently do this out of the nature of the genre they work in. Busy streets are very chaotic and overwhelming, which means everything is happening at once all around you, so it makes sense that these photographers would have to focus on the micro details in a larger scene, otherwise there is no focus in the image. By searching some of the greats in street photography it becomes apparent that they saw specific details in chaotic scenes, focusing on that one detail, whether its an object, shadow, or person. In other words, they simplified the scene ignoring everything else.
A Landscape Photographers Greatest Weakness
Simplification is probably the biggest weakness of landscape photographers, they focus way too much on the big picture (figuratively and literally). These types of photographers put too much attention in capturing that great big landscape to print and put on a wall, and it’s not necessarily their fault though. I think some of this mindset comes from cultural influences within the genre itself, which is a whole other discussion I wont get into. Getting the big beautiful landscape is great and all, but there is a lot of missed opportunity in the small details of the landscape around you. Its in these small details many unique images can be made.
A Landscape Photographers Best Asset is Also Their Worst Curse
Why don't landscape photographers look at the world in the same way as their street counterparts? In the end, street and landscape photography are pretty much the same thing, we just shoot on different types of streets, so to speak. But landscape photographers have a tendency to focus on many elements at once, and again, do so because of the nature of their own genre. For example, The experience of observing beautiful landscapes is taken in all at once to the viewer. All the elements in the scene ( ie. rivers, trees, stones etc.) work together as a single entity that your mind perceives as one harmonious subject. With that, there's a natural tendency to want to try and capture all of those elements in your frame at once, disconnecting the photographer from the individual components of the scene. This is why I would argue that a big beautiful landscape can ironically be a huge distraction for the photographer, there's just too much happening.
How can a landscape photographer get into the mindset of a street photographer?
Longer Focal Lengths
There are many ways to do this, but personally, I have been using longer focal lengths. It forces you to frame small pieces of a larger scene and focus on that one aspect. For example, I was on a hike with my brother down in the Arizona desert. We got a late morning start and I knew that the light was not going to be optimal for the majority of subjects around us. So I decided to just bring only a 70-300mm, focusing on very small subjects in the area, such as the wildflowers. Even though it was the midday sun I was able to find patches of flowers that were dabbled, half in light and shadow on the forest floor. If you look close enough at any environment you will find spectacular mini scenes in the worst times of day.
Boring Scenes
The other way I can think of is to shoot more boring scenes. Now “boring” can mean many different things, but in general, when you show up to a location and are initially unimpressed and uninspired. If you spent any decent amount of time photographing anything you know exactly what I mean. These boring scenes kick your brain into focus and look at closer details. I find that the more bland a scene is the more time I spend looking at each individual element in the frame, adding and/or omitting things in the composition. Also, that's where some of the most original photos are made, creativity is essentially forced on you working with boring scenes. Sometime ago I took a backpacking trip to The Lost Cost in California. When we first arrived there, it was grey sky’s with very thick fog all along the coast. I walked up and down the beach for hours really trying to find a interesting subject, but to no avail. I noticed all over the beach there were these smooth black stones laying about, and I knew there had to be something here. I tried to compose a number of them into one scene, but there was no good harmony between them all. So I decided to find only one stone and work with that, using a slow shutter speed to eliminate detail in the water and sky.
In this post I am speaking quite generally, and I know a lot of landscape shooters who can simplify their scenes masterfully, these people are often the most experienced and most talented. These are just a few examples of how you can practice the method of simplification. One could probably write an entire book on the subject, but I just wanted to leave a few of my own.