Today I had the pleasure to lead a workshop about street photography in Amsterdam. The meetup was organized by Irina from KGS Global.
Let’s say that the weather was not on our side but we had some good fun.
I had the chance to share some of my tips on how to be creative, have fun and get some good picture to be proud about.
Creativity through constraints
Every time you feel a lack of creativity, give yourself a rule. Limits can help you to get creative, lern more and explore things that you would never try otherwise. For instance force yourself to shoot with a prime lens, or just use a specific focal length of your zoom lens. You can decide to spend the entire day at f2.8 or just shooting round objects.
Every time you narrow down your possibilities, you start to explore the niche and you will find new inspiration. Try out this trick, and let me know!
Forget your display
Even if you have a top camera, the LCD display sucks. I was really disappointed that even a super duper camera like the Leica M9-P had a pretty crappy display glued on their back. But why do we look at the display so often? To check our latest shot. We check the light, the colors, the composition, the exposure, etc etc. And then we take decisions. We decide to recompose the shot, to take another one, to try with another aperture, etc. So basically, we take decisions based on what we see on our display which, as mentioned before, is really bad in term of quality.
For this reason I strongly suggest to narrow down what the display is telling you: Shoot RAW and set your camera to BW. You will always be able to edit the pictures in full color but you visualize the picture in black and white. Then, if possible, put your histogram on.
This way you have all the information you need to take wise decisions for your next shot: composition and exposure. The only two things that you can really change straight away when you take pictures. Colors, white balance and contrast will be fixed later on your computer screen, that in the worst case scenario is at least a hundred times better in term of brightness and color balance.
Keep shooting
https://www.instagram.com/p/kzhaf/
Your camera is tougher than you think. Don’t worry about a few drops of water on it, you really need to get extremely wet to get troubles. Just take some plastic bags with you and keep on shooting even in the rain.
The full set of my pictures and the group pool are available on Flickr. Enjoy!
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