Welcome to your monthly Street Photography Magazine created by myself Tommy Regan, showcasing personal projects and photos taken by you using the hashtag #trstreetmag on VSCO and Instagram. For a chance to get your work featured just use the hashtag in your latest VSCO and Instagram posts. It's FREE!
In this month's issue, we'll be talking about my first photography workshop in Chinatown, Birmingham. This workshop focused on staying creative in confined spaces by using compositional tools such as leading lines, negative space, symmetry, rule of thirds, colours and foreground framing. Due to the high volume of interest in these skills, I plan on doing another workshop in January as well as online sessions which will be more focused on the post-processing side of things.
As I'm writing this, we have moved into the Christmas season and the Christmas market's are now open to visit, so some of the images in this blog will feel tailored to the festive season. For those of you that couldn't make it, this blog will include some useful information about what was covered during the workshop and although I may recap on bits in the future, you're always free to ask me questions via my Instagram DM's if you want to learn something new from me.
The workshop started with three exercises with around 5 minutes of me teaching the skill then 15 minutes of independant practice. It's important as a photographer to learn new things and implement them straight away, your experiences will define what kind of photographer you become. The importance of the workshop was to give people multiple ways to think about framing images, layering these skills together gives you lot's to think about when you go out to do photography and prevents you from feeling stuck.
The Importance of Rule of Thirds: Using the lines on your phone or HD camera helps you to learn how to frame your images, if you use a phone and don't have these turned on, you can usually turn them on in your phone settings in the camera menu, typically called "Grid". 'Rule of Thirds' consists of a grid made up of 9 squares, three vertical sections and three horizontal sections. The middle square on the grid has 4 individual cross hair sections, we can use these to place our subject on these cross sections, this is an easy way to frame your photos without extensive knowledge and is especially helpful as a beginner. As a point and shoot photographer, it's easy to completely miss this step out so if you'd like to learn more, keep reading.
You can use each vertical section on the grid e.g: the first 3 squares on the left, in the middle or on the right going from top to bottom or alternatively the first 3 squares from left to right at the top, middle and bottom. Rather than placing all subjects in the centre, experiment by placing still subjects on the left or right hand side, this way it adds more emotional depth to your images. See image above as an example of this.
Another important technique that ties into the image above is called Leading Lines.
'Leading Lines' is pretty self explanatory, they are lines that lead the eye along an image towards the subject. As you can see in the same image above, there are overhead wires that point diagonally across the image as a top frame and there is a diagonal line the opposite way towards the building across the tent towards the building as the main focal point, this line also acts as a bottom frame.
Following on from this, we can talk about the important use of Colour Psychology.
Colours are one of the most important parts of photography and they describe how we feel when we see an image. Take some time to review the image above and describe to yourself how you feel when looking at it, focus on what makes it stand out, what do the colours do to make the image stand out and how did the photographer use colours to convey emotion.
If you're feeling stuck, an easy way to do this is focus on the part of the image that captures your attention. I'm assuming you're either looking at the red or greens. Red is a colour that captures attention while also providing people with a sense of affection, green on the other hand is calming, linked to our health and wellbeing. Red and Green compliment each other well despite not being complementary colours, they are primary colours on the colour wheel.
Not only when taking the image but also editing an image it's important to understand how you add emotion back into a photo if it didn't already feel storytelling enough. Since the location was in Chinatown, I knew that darker reds and teal colours are strong amongst Chinese tradition so I wanted to effectively communicate that and while we have red and green on opposite side of the image we also have more neutral colours like beige, grey, khaki green and a bright green bag in the central parts of the image. These colours help balance the red and green so it doesn't feel dominating. Next time you're out, look for Colour and think about how you can make it look interesting using the techniques you previously learned in this blog.
Using everything we've spoken about so far, you can use rule of thirds to place subjects off-centre, combine colours into your image by using foreground and background elements and lastly, the other important skill is using Lighting effectively.
Other than using Colours, Lighting plays a huge part and is the most important part of photography to spend time focusing on. Whether shooting in colour or monochrome, Lighting is the reason we create images and understanding how it works can improve your confidence behind the camera. In the image above, I used a smaller aperture at F2.8 to create background blur (also known as bokeh), this creates a shallow depth of field meaning the subjects closer to the camera are more in focus. By adjusting Aperture you can create a lot of cool effects such as bokeh. The lady wearing a blue coat with orange hood and the lights in the background matching the same vibe made it ideal to capture a unique moment, but how did I do this you wonder?
I could see the background lights and on a busy street of Birmingham, I thought I'd wait for someone wearing something colourful to step into frame, as most people wear black it singles out any approaching colour, with a bit of luck and waiting you can get a candid image like this. Remember to use faster shutter speeds, this won't be a problem when using phone cameras, it almost always automatically does this for you. Like I said earlier, editing plays just as important of a role as taking the photo but editing won't always save a bad photo.
By learning to use these methods and lots of days of practice, you'll be surprised what photos you can create even without a HD camera!
I hope you enjoyed this month's issue of TR Street Magazine, stay tuned for next month where I will be reviewing some of the best images taken this year by the community. Remember to use hashtag #trstreetmag in your Street Photography photos to get your chance to feature in the end of year blog. I'm looking forward to seeing you all in December to review the end of an amazing year.