 (“What’s on a doorman’s mind?” by Simon Garnier)
Eric’s note: The following guest article is by Simon Garnier, part scientist and part street photographer who lives and works in New Jersey. Read his previous article about getting close in street photography and this new article where he discusses what it takes to take a great street photograph.
What does it take to make a good street photograph? Many, many, many things. Some weeks ago on this blog, for instance, I discussed the importance of taking a picture at the right scale, that is, at the scale of the event you are photographing. As you can imagine, however, the scaling problem is not the only challenge one faces when doing street photography. I might be at the right scale, but not at the right position or angle; the natural light might create shadows masking important elements; the composition of the picture (that is, the organization of the different components of the image relative to each other and to the dimensions of the picture) might diminish the meaning and clarity of the photograph; the colors (if you shoot in color like me) might simply not get along very well (try flashy green on purple for instance :-) ); the contrasts might be too low to easily distinguish the foreground from the background; etc, etc. Street photography is an easy genre to start with (the easiest maybe?), but for sure it is one of the hardest to master as all these problems must be tackled under strong time constraints.
