How I shoot street photography when I shouldn’t be in the streets?
It's been a while since I did this. But I figured it's not a bad idea to just write it out. Some people might even find it useful so why the hell not. So here you go.
It was early 2020 and the world was about to get royally fu… Well. We all know what happened. On top of all that I had just quit my soul-sucking job thinking I'd easily find a better one with my resume. How wrong I was. As soon as my notice period ended the first major lockdown hit and to the huge surprise of no-one the job market was just peachy. Suddenly I had all the time in the world to do absolutely nothing.
I love street photography. I absolutely adore the process of wandering the city, watching the life go by and freeze the most interesting as well as the most mundane moments of it with my camera to turn them into my contrasty monochrome slices of human existence in Lightroom. But what do I do when the streets are empty and I shouldn't really be in them? I've noticed online that quite a significant amount of photographers went towards the “I'm gonna shoot the empty streets now that I can“ and I fully get that. It was an eerie feeling seeing usually packed and living parts of town suddenly without a single living soul. It was as scary as it was kind of beautiful. Finally, you could enjoy the city without armies of tourists treating it as a backdrop for the ‘gram and without all the scammers trying to squeeze every last penny from those same tourists. It was peaceful. But I couldn't photograph that. At least not at that particular time in my life. Photographs without people in them felt pointless to me. I've got a different opinion now, but you know… People change. Anyway, back to the original line of thought. I needed humans in my pictures. I needed life, motion.
I've always been a gamer. Ever since I used to play on my brother’s Commodore 64. Well, I spent a major portion of the first lockdown pretty much glued to my Playstation 4 playing games that are technologically slightly more advanced than the ones on the above-mentioned system. A group of friends and I weren’t really playing to get any in-game goals done or to reach any score. We were mostly just chatting and wandering as a group around the gorgeous world of Red Dead Redemption 2. It was that game in which I discovered the photo mode. I’ve played around in photo modes in other games before, but none of those had a world as gorgeous and yet so grounded in reality as this Rockstar masterpiece.
The single-player photo mode lets you pause the world and move your virtual camera pretty much anywhere you want, use any angle you can think of, and set any focal length or depth of field you want. It feels like cheating. It's too easy. That's why I probably wouldn't really consider it photography. But I wouldn't disregard it completely either. It's the perfect practice for photographing out in the world. The lighting in the game is gorgeous and can be incorporated into your images in plenty of ways. The framing is all up to you and once you discover some interesting angles you haven't necessarily thought of before you can try and implement them in your real-life photography once you're able to photograph people out in the streets again. It's not without its downsides though.
Video games do have their limits and so do the systems they're played on. They look amazing when they're looked at from when the developers intended. But change your lens to an ultra-wide 15mm equivalent to get an amazing frame with an awesome composition and you suddenly see that the folded newspaper or the person's face you're incredibly close to is a lot less detailed than what you saw from your standard viewing distance. The shadows suddenly don't match the objects casting them because they might be floating ever so slightly above whatever surface they're seemingly standing on. You've got to make the angles work to make it look like a real photograph from a distance. Once it's watched up close the mystery is gone though. Luckily, my Playstation is still the original release model which can barely output 1080p images, so the lack of close up detail is hidden behind the tiny resolution.
After I take the screenshot I don't apply any in-game filter but rather offload the images to Lightroom where I edit it the same way I do with all of my street photographs.
I know it's gonna be a while before we can all go back to normal and we never actually might in the same way ever again, but I'm still hopeful. Street photography can be a beautiful way to look at the world around us and I don't think it's going anywhere anytime soon. We might just need to adapt to the new normal. Anyway… Here are a few images I took last spring. Stay safe out there.
