Street Photography Posts Roundup

Another post to organize past posts...
Street photography is my favorite by far. Here is a roundup of some of my street photography posts:

• In April 2009, I did an intro on street photography for that month's theme.
• When you are just starting out, the hardest thing about street photography is getting up the nerve to take photos of strangers. My first tip is to take photos of people who don't mind the attention and my second tip is to try taking photos at public events like demonstrations.
• When I was in New Orleans, I conducted an experiment in street portraiture. My goal was to ask 10 random strangers if I could take their portrait. Guess what? People are pretty nice.
• Also in New Orleans, I tried some street photography at night.
• In Paris, there is never a shortage of public events. The 2009 Techno Parade became the subject of several posts. Earlier in the day, a bus stop told quite a story. By the end of the day, things got a little more dangerous. My "10 seconds at the Paris Techno Parade" captured an adrenaline-filled experience. At the end of 2010, I decided to do a full write-up for JPG magazine and the essay was featured as story of the week for the first week in 2011. I think that essay best captures what I felt in the moment.

• Another favorite is the post I did about a riot that broke out in front of our apartment in Paris. Various blogs and forums around the world linked to the post—many of them for the wrong reasons, if you ask me. The comments on that post got pretty heated.
• Other, less volatile moments include Dora the Explorer getting punched, a graffiti artist at work, candids from a Paris photo show, and a zombie parade.

(Conceptual) Projects

 Adding a little public display of affection to a straight-laced BYU campus.

For some, the term "conceptual photography" has a negative connotation. The current Wikipedia definition is relatively neutral:

"Conceptual photography as a part of conceptual art, a photography genre in which the artist makes a photograph of a concept or idea. Usually the conception of the idea precedes the realization of the photography."

The strict genre definition, then, quickly leads to academic philosophical existentialist debates (but then, doesn't everything?): Which comes first, essence or existence? Sartre be damned, I can never remember and don't really care. For the purposes of this ongoing compilation of posts, I am taking the broad view that all projects are conceptual once they are organized. Whether the idea preceded the photos or came from the photos isn't at issue in this list. The idea of this post is simply to get back to re-organizing the sidebar of my blog. That said, here are some posts that might inspire your own projects in some way:

• An intro to "concept" from when it was part of the now-defunct "monthly special"
• Inspiration from John Baldessari: a master of ideas
• When I was playing around with the idea of "photo within a photo" I did a two part post about turning my not-so-romantic surroundings into Paris (check out part 1 and part 2—they still make me laugh) and another post about remembering the orchards that were lost when my neighborhood was built.
• My love of street photography led me to create a Blurb book called Manif (short for "manifestation"—the French word for demonstration). You can look at the whole book in this post—just be click the view full screen box (the four diagonal arrows) in the lower right.
• My biggest project to date is the years-in-the-making ABC Paris project. It's interesting for me to look back at the origins, and then see how it ended up getting featured on Design Sponge and Black Eiffel, which resulted in a four-year contract with a company in Vermont. And of course, how can I not do some shameless promotion for the prints that you can buy.
• Another "project" (more like two things I made for a post)—OK, so idea for a project—is the "personality pie chart." I did one of my son Lucas and one of a friend in France. It could be fun to do something with later. Feels very commercial to me.
• A "things scrawled on wood in Paris" project is a casual ongoing project that looks at the kind of graffiti people did before there was spray paint. I have much better photos since I did the post—perhaps a follow-up will be in order.
• My long term Utah-based project is about State Street, and although I haven't done a real post about it yet, these "commute" photos came from a couple of hours of shooting.

The dog days...

...are over? 
No. Probably not. Actually, I just wanted to put a gratuitous dog photo in my post to brighten things up. I have been neglecting my blog once again, mainly because I have been neglecting my laptop and spending all my time obsessing over my new iPad 2, which will hopefully liberate me from my laptop when I teach my photography class in Paris in May. Which leads to my strategy for posting again...

I need to prep my students for my "French Culture through Photography" class in Paris this spring. This isn't a class for seasoned photography students. It's more like a crash course in photo history, cultural studies, and creating photo essays. The idea is to help American study abroad students learn more about France through photography. If you're going to spend so much time taking photos, you may as well learn from the best—No, I don't mean me—by "the best" I mean Eugene Atget, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Sophie Calle, and so many other inspiring photographers. We will study the masters and then do photo essays inspired by their work. The last time I taught the course, we were there for 3 months. This time, I'm doing it in 3 weeks. Yikes!

With a few exceptions, the students have not studied photography. My assumption is that the great majority will be using point-and-shoot cameras and will be uploading photos without significant post-processing. None of this bothers me in the least. What does, however, drive me crazy, is to see people turn in noisy, blurry, or otherwise crappy photos because they are trying to make their poor camera do something it wasn't built to do. And so, the first lesson in my series of pre-Paris prep is:

Work with what you've got.

 Sure, it would be nice to have unlimited resources and buy a new Leica, and I'm envious if you can, but for the rest of us, we better learn to appreciate what we've got.

Take "American Idol," for example. How many times do the judges emphasize the importance of knowing who you are? Work within your range, work within your style, play to your strengths, etc. etc. I'm sure you see where this is headed...If your camera isn't a diva, then don't make it sing Celine Dion ballads. OK, you know what I mean.

At Sundance this year, one of the feature-length movies was literally a pastiche of dozens of different film stocks that the student filmmakers had saved from various commercial projects. A scrap here, a scrap there, some old stuff from eBay, toss it all in the freezer until you've got enough, and then try to figure out how to make a film out of it. The location? The student's family owns a farm, so how about that? The script? That comes AFTER thinking about real life constraints. If you start with a script that requires heavy CGI effects, period costumes, and exotic locations, you've already failed (unless you're Ed Wood). Instead, the filmmakers took what they had and invented the film that those ingredients could produce. The result was meditative, moody, almost surreal, and while it did not make my best-of list, the film still inspired me.

Another Sundance film. Someone asked how the director had cast the male lead. His reply:
"I thought...Who is the best actor in America [pause] that I have on my cell phone?"

Now apply this to your camera. What can it do? How does it handle different lighting situations? Under what conditions does it get too noisy? Are there scenarios where that noise might actually contribute something positive? How does your camera work on different shutter speeds? Is it good at freezing motion or do you usually get blur? Are there situations where the blur might be desirable? What about depth of field? How much control do you have? Could the size of your camera work to your advantage in street photography? Is it easy to take photos without drawing attention to yourself? etc. etc.

If you work with what you've got, you can do great things. If you try to pretend your camera is something that it isn't, you could end up looking like a fool.

Fix perspective (aka "keystoning") in Photoshop

You know when you take a photo of a building and the perspective makes it look like it's getting more narrow at the top? That's called "the keystone effect" and it can be very annoying. But there's a quick way to fix it in Photoshop, so your snapshots look more professional.

First duplicate your layer (Mac: Command–J; PC: Ctrl–J) so you can toggle between the original and the adjusted versions later. Now, with your top layer active...
In CS5, just go to Filter-->Lens Correction

In CS4 and earlier, go to Filter-->Distort-->Lens Correction

 In CS5, you will have to click the "custom" tab instead of the "auto correction" that appears when the window opens (the "auto correction" doesn't appear in earlier versions, sadly, because it's really cool and I'll deal with it in another tutorial)
A pop-up window will now appear with your image at the left and some distort options at the right. The pictures are pretty self-explanatory. Go to the vertical and horizontal perspective sliders and drag to the left or to the right (go ahead, be extreme at first so you can see what it's doing—or you slide them like crazy and pretend you're in "Inception") until you fix the perspective.

For my photo, I brought the vertical perspective -23 to the left until the towers of Notre Dame didn't look like they were being sucked into space by aliens, and then I shifted the horizontal perspective just a little to straighten the building more. Just eyeball it.

One more difference between CS5 and earlier versions. As you shift the perspective, CS5 crops as needed. In earlier versions, once you commit your transform, you will have to re-crop your image. Toggle the background layer off and you will see what I mean. If your initial image it too tightly cropped then you may end up losing parts of the picture you wanted to keep.

There you have it. A super quick fix for a very common problem.