2What Are the Best Camera Settings for Street Photography
Daytime Street Photography Camera Settings
We can separate daytime camera settings into two categories. These are high aperture and low aperture settings.
Using a Higher Aperture for Street Photography
The most common lens used in street photography is the 50mm prime. This is a great piece of glass with largest apertures ranging from f1.8 down to f1.
Do you need such a large aperture for street photography? For the most part no, and an aperture for f2.8 will work very well.
But you might want to photograph at such a high aperture due to subject isolation. The higher aperture will allow you to blur out a distracting background. You’ll also be able to focus on the person or people you’re photographing.
3First Steps to Become a More Confident Street Photographer
So, you’re thinking of becoming a street photographer? What are the most important things to get you started? Find out!
As with every type of photography, if you’ve never done it before, you have a choice of either preparing for it through research until you’re ready to give it a try or simply jumping into it. This is exactly what Frederik Trovatten, now a passionate Danish street photographer living in Mexico City, did.
Hard Work, a Lot of It
First of all, let’s start with the very beginning. One day, Trovatten was on a small boat in Xochimilco, a 40-minute drive away from his current home in Mexico city, enjoying a day out with his mother, who was visiting him all the way from Denmark, when a nearby elderly couple caught his eye.
Now, if you’re serious about immersing yourself in street photography, you have got to be ready to process these moments very quickly and be able to take a shot of it, even if may not always be technically perfect. Trovatten took a photograph of the couple with his camera phone, as he did not pursue photography at the time, and realized that street scenes might just have been something that interested him enough to try photography.
4Stunning Early Entries of the 2019 Sony World Photography Awards
After a record number of entries in 2018, the Sony World Photography Awards are well on their way to another successful competition. This leading free photography competitionhas taken place for the past 12 years and is divided into four divisions—Professional, Open, Youth, and Student. To celebrate the announcement of this year’s expert jury, the World Photo Organisation has released early highlights of the Open contest, which rewards the world’s best single images.
Participants can submit work to 10 different categories that capture the wide variety of artistry in the field of photography. From inspiring travel photos to touching portraits, it’s impossible not to be moved by the talent of these photographers. Notable entries include Christy Lee Rogers, known for her dynamic underwater photographs that look like Baroque paintings.
You might have seen Bianca Simonetti’s photograph of a motorbike resting underwater on our social channels last month. We were taken with the striking image and as we found out more about Bianca and her reasons for taking these images we knew the wider PADI community would be interested too, so we took the time to ask a few more questions…
What is it that inspired you to start underwater photography?
I’ve been a photographer and a scuba diver for years, but I’m also a Naturalist and a swimmer, so underwater photography has been a logical consequence.
Your current project is focussing on ‘Marine Litter’, why have you decided upon this subject?
This project has been realised for a master of photojournalism (SDF) at ISFCI in Rome. I live in Italy, in a small seaside town and in winter the beach in front of my house is usually covered in rubbish brought by the tide. Hence, looking out the window my first thought was to tell through pictures, what it really lurks beneath the surface.
Plastic litter drifts across the seas and washes up on our beaches, killing wildlife and scarring the shoreline. The unbelievable thing to me is that most human beings still don’t realise the gravity of the situation. Fortunately, it looks like something is changing, and I hope mine will be just another one of the many voices raised to protect our oceans.
610 Photographers Who Have Told the Story of the U.S.–Mexico Border
“If you’re born on one side or the other, that can decide how prosperous and free you are,” he said. But the line itself can be arbitrary; borders have been decided by any number of reasons, he continued. “With the passage of time, people start to see them as permanent.”
The origins of the U.S.–Mexico border trace back to President James K. Polk’s “Manifest Destiny”—which sent American troops into Mexico to expand the U.S.’s territory to the western coast—as well as the desire among Southern Americans for more slave states. The Mexican–American War ensued, and at its close in 1848, the border was hotly disputed by the two countries. The following year, after an agreement had been reached, the American survey team that set out to plot its path nearly died due to to the unforgiving climate and terrain.
