I love street photography! It's unpredicatable, it's real and best of all it's ever changing! My friend Jeff Tamagini is an amazing street photographer that lives in Boston, MA! He's one of these photographers that just has the eye! He loves what he does and you can tell by his images. I'm regularly checking his BLOG and you should too! In this article he goes over the rules of photography!

THERE IS NO SPOON...

The world of street photography is a vast one. The genre contains everything from candids to portraits, the built environment, events, and everyday life. While in the world of photography it is good to learn the rules, this is an area that it pays to break them!

Don’t get me wrong, everyone should know and understand what ISO, shutter speed, aperture, rules of thirds are and know them by heart. Hell you should be able to know how to control these on your camera system with your eyes closed. But once you do there is no stopping you from breaking all the rules to create some truly stunning photography that matches your vision. If all you ever did was obey the laws of conventional photography then well, lets face it, your photography would most likely start to look like everyone else’s and kind of boring. But don’t get me wrong just because you broke the rules doesn’t guarantee success, you also need some interesting subject matter to go along with it. Photographing 1000 flowers will get just as tiring obeying the laws as breaking them. It is the cohesiveness of it all that creates the one of a kind photo.

I hear you asking, what do you mean then by breaking the rules? Well let’s start by looking at your situation. You are walking down a street in your town/city. You see this amazing beam of light cutting through a narrow street. You put your camera up to your face and you snap a photo. You look at the LCD on the back and you think to your self this looks like crap nothing like I am picturing in my mind. Ah, see in your mind you are already breaking the rules, you have a particular vision in your head but the camera isn’t translating it. Instead of having that camera you are holding on Aperture Priority, flip it to manual start with your setting from your last shot as a baseline. The start dialing some negative exposure compensation, if that isn’t enough drop your f-stop till you clip almost every shadow there is, but you have that one beam of light darting across the building and lighting up something on the other side.

Never be afraid to clip shadows or blow out highlights if it helps achieve your vision of the image. If you are at a sidewalk café and you make a picture of a woman where she is just completely engulfed in light, guess what at that point the photo is about her, who cares if you have lost detail in the sky or the background.

Work with different lenses. Wide, telephoto, fisheye, tilt-shift, toy lenses, they all work. There are some purists out there that say street should only be shot with a 35 or 50mm lens. I say screw them; break out a fisheye or a 70-200mm lens. Some may accuse of “sniping” but guess what one of the most well known street shooters today, Jay Maisel, shoots with a 28-300 and he works with the 300mm end most of the time, no one calls him a sniper! There are people that shoot street and get right in peoples faces to take a picture hoping to get the perfect reactionary moment (and not punched in the face). Others shoot from the edges shooting more environmental street shots, while another may spend his or her time at the top of a tall set of steps shooting down on the world below. With street shooting there is no right or wrong answer, it is as much art as it is photojournalism, you are documenting the world that surrounds you and in your vision.

Stop getting lost in the world of post processing, HDR, 10 stop filters, plugin packages; what this person or that person just posted to flickr, twitter, 500px, Facebook, Google+ and instead focus on you and your camera, what story are you trying to tell, what’s your vision.

What rule are you going to break today, remember there is no spoon.

Check out Jeff Tamagini and more of his work by CLICKING HERE