Part two: People unaware - Learning points

The idea behind the "street photography" is to explore on foot, photographing life on the pavement, in open-air cafes, markets, parks and so on.
Nothing is pre-planned; the photographer relies completely on his powers of observation and anticipation, and on luck, to find interesting images from ordinary situations.
The emphasis is on three things:
1. being unobtrusive
2. spotting potential pictures in advance
3. shooting quickly with the camera's automated settings

The methods tend to divide between being unnoticed on the one hand and gaining trust and permission, if only implicitly, on the other (personally, I use the second method).
In un-posed photography, in which the subject is unaware, the people in front of the camera present a fluid situation.
They move, act and interact, all without guidance.
Inevitably, in any given scene that is framed, certain moments will simply make a better-looking image than do others.

The great French reportage photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson coined the phrase 'the decisive moment' to describe this key quality in a photograph.
In his 1952 book of the same name, he defined it as ‘the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as the precise organisation of forms which gives that event its proper expression'.
The moment normally hinges on what the subject is doing – the most striking expression, or action, or gesture – but in other situations it may depend more on how the photographer chooses to frame the composition.

Longer focal lengths make for objective 'across-the-street' compositions, and separate the photographer from his subject, both physically in distance and in the sense of involvement.
Depth of field is relatively shallow, making accurate focusing important, but with the camera set to auto-focus this is usually not a problem.

A wide-angle lens has two valuable functions: it places the person firmly in their surroundings, and it draws the viewer into the scene.
In a situation in which there are people moving around with a wide-angle lens the photographer will be taking in much of the immediate surroundings, as in order to partly fill the frame with a figure, he will typically be shooting from a few or several feet away.
This naturally makes him fairly obvious to passers-by, and one problem is having someone who is not the subject in frame and staring at the camera.
The way to avoid this is to raise the camera only immediately before the shot, then lower it. Alternatively, simply wait it out, or even briefly lower the camera, glance to one side so as to divert their attention, then shoot.
The photographer is clearly in the middle of things, a style sometimes known as 'subjective camera', that conveys a sense of being there and of activity.

The concept of ‘standard’ and ‘normal’ in lens focal length is that the view approximates to what the photographer would see with the naked eye.
In street photography, ‘standard’ means non-insistent, with no special graphic distortion applied to the picture.
On the one hand, this means that the photographer does not have the benefit of a graphic strength to help the images, but on the other hand, the sheer normality of a standard focal length keeps the attention firmly on what is happening in the scene, without distraction.
There is no need to think about the special difficulties of working either at a distance or very close.