The Greatest Skill in Street Photography

Learning a new skill such as street photography can be a steep learning curve, but it’s often underestimated the challenge ahead when taking on something you have no prior experience of. Because street photography has such a low barrier to entry i.e. all you need is a camera (and most people carry one of those around every day, attached to their phones) and a comfortable pair of shoes, most newbies can hit the ground running (literally) relatively quickly. But therein lies the problem, as someone who’s new to street photography you can be given this false sense of security that every photograph you take is as good as the ones taken by legends such as Ernst Haas. This is due to not having any reference points to what amount of progress you’ve been making, mainly because you haven’t made any at all if you’ve only just started! This is however a good thing, without this level of beginners enthusiasm you might not be motivated to carry on, even if you’re initial images aren’t that great.

Losing Motivation

Once you start to follow other street photographers and see what the possibilities are in terms of creating amazing images you start to realise that your own photography isn’t actually that great and you have a lot to learn! The graph below visualises this progress by showing that initial increase in skill, then the drop when you lose motivation and the reality hits you, then a plateau when you realise how much work is ahead and after a few months of going out day after day you actually start to make solid progress albeit not as fast as you initially thought you were making when you first started,

So you keep going out, taking lots of images, you post some to social media, some get more likes than others, the ones you think are great don’t get many likes and the ones you think aren’t your best photographs get more likes. This can cause confusion because you start to wonder how good you are and how much progress you’re making. The lesson here is ignore social media when trying to understand how good your images are, but that’s one for another day.

The Skill

Every street photographer takes thousands of images over a period of a few months, no matter what level they’re at. Even the very best street photographers fail 99% of the time and take mainly bad images in their eyes, but what sets them apart from someone who’s just starting out is their ability to know which of their images are absolute gems and which are destined for the recycle bin. That’s where the skill lies. There has to be more than just a picture of a person walking down the street doing nothing out of the ordinary or someone coming out of Sainsbury’s with a couple of shopping bags, neither of these make for an interesting photo even if you do turn them into black and white and give it a bit of contrast!

Keep Going Out

Being able to tell whether an image depicts an interesting story or has great composition is a skill that can only be learn’t after being out taking photographs as much as possible over a long period of time and if you’re enjoying the process of doing that then it will only be a matter of time.