Traditional or candid street photography

When you think of ‘street photography,’ you usually think of a picture of a stranger walking around a city like New York, Amsterdam or Tokyo. But although these photos make up a large part of street photography, the genre is actually much broader.

In the photography community, there is often agreement that this is one of the types of street photography. It has the following characteristics:

1. It captures the daily lives of people in their everyday surroundings.
2. It is candid photography, meaning that the people are unaware of the photographer's presence.
3. It is more documentary or journalistic in nature.
4. There is a balance between people, surroundings, story and emotion.
5. It has traditionally been photographed with a focal length of 35 to 50 mm.

The most famous snapshot street photographers were Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908-2004) and Robert Doisneau (1912-1994). They set the standard for street photography in general and snapshot photography in particular. Their photos can be seen everywhere on the internet.

As you can imagine, a photo of people in a public setting does not automatically make for a compelling photo.

The human experience is at the heart of street photography. A cityscape without people, for example, would fall more under architectural photography than street photography.

But rules are sometimes there to be broken. Sometimes street photographs without human subjects can still tell a human story and therefore fit into the broad category of street photography. The street scene after a festival, for example, may not show anyone, but it can still say a lot about the human experience.

Technical quality is always important, but in street photography it is not celebrated as much as in landscape photography, for example. A landscape photo should be sharp, have perfect colours, clear lines, good proportions and many tonal gradations.

Street photography is different: it can be grainy, blurry or even distorted. Composition is very important. The more familiar you are with the principles of composition, the more likely you are to take a good snapshot.

Photos that have a compositional connection are also fascinating, e.g. a repetition of colours, evenly distributed people or a group of things that the viewer perceives as similar. Photos that capture a funny scene, show surprise or signal distress are usually more interesting.