Find Your Frame

A street photography masterclass

Craig Whitehead
Contents
Foreword

1/ Street your way

Look beyond the obvious – street photography is what you
make it

2/ Find your tribe

Test out different street photography styles and pick one that
suits

3/ Make kit count

All you need is a camera – but one that you know inside out
and back to front

4/ Get out there

Think about when and where to go – but whatever you do, just
go

5/ Limber up
To get the best street photography performance, do some
warm-up exercises

6/ Scope the scene

Close observation tells you what’s about to go down, so you’re
ready when it does

7/ Don’t be shy
 Be confident and leave your inhibitions at home, they’ll only
hold you back

8/ Spot one-offs
Keep your eyes peeled for unreproducible occurrences,
whether human or otherwise

9/ See in retrospect
Give your work staying power by featuring indicators of the
present that may soon be past

10/ Own your shot

Decide what your image is focused on and use your

composition to take the viewer there

11/ Contrast to intrigue

Engage the viewer with striking juxtapositions

12/ Frame within a frame

Make order out of chaos by boxing your subject in

13/ Mix up perspective

Make your viewers do a double-take and they will start to see

the city differently

14/ Follow the light

Allow yourself to be led by the light – it’s what makes your

images come alive

15/ Abstract the world

Learn to see the reflection before you see what’s beyond it

16/ Know your patch

Compile a mental library of locations across your city that you

can return to time and again

17/ Be a sharp critic

Create a distance from your images so you can be objective

when selecting them

18/ Let your images shine

Go easy on the post-production – subtle tweaks, made

incisively, will bring out the best in your work

19/ Pop the Insta bubble

Nothing beats social for some things – but don’t get caught up
in it

20/ Stay curious

Keep your eyes open – inspiration is everywhere

Index
 Foreword
By Kai Wong

W hat a fantastic honour it is to be given this

opportunity to write a foreword for a book written by
my friend and fellow photographer, Craig Whitehead,
who I have known for years and with whom I have shot
many a street photo, sometimes risking life and limb –
you’d be surprised at the damage a load of projectile
Brussel sprouts can do – just to get that elusive street
shot. He is a great guy and an even better
photographer, as his photos bear testament. Take a
look at his images and you will soon get a sense of his
unique style and identity, which have become
somewhat of a rarity in the age of social media where
the quest for success – interactions, likes and follows
– has often come at the expense of originality.
Craig certainly sees the world differently. He takes
elements that are familiar and composes them in a
refreshingly new way that is a visual feast for the eyes
– his work is part-conventional street photography,
part-abstract art, part-surrealism, part ‘I-don’t-know-
what-label-to-put-on-it-but-it’s-really-rather-good’.
He is a gifted photographer who is technically
proficient, yet has an artistic way of using the frame to
put together lines and shapes in a geometrically
pleasing manner. The little details to which Craig pays
attention will make you want to come back for more.
His images have depth; they are more than just pretty,
perfectly composed pictures. You are not just looking
at the photo, you are also taking a peek into the mind
of Craig Whitehead.
Photography like this doesn’t come from being a
casual snapper, and Craig is certainly dedicated to his
craft. I first met him on the street, when he was busy
taking photos, and I always had a knack of bumping
into him whenever he was doing so. When we did
meet up, it was to get busy with taking street photos
and we only ever talked about street photography. I
can’t tell you what his favourite colour is or who his
favourite Ghostbuster is, but what I can tell you is that,
apart from taking amazing images, Craig is
wonderfully articulate about his approach to taking
street photos, which is always insightful and inspiring
for photographers of any proficiency to elevate their
own work to another level.
 Even if you don’t have the benefit of running into
him and marvelling at his work being made live, you
have the good fortune of having this lovely book, filled
with all his luscious photos and inspiring thoughts
about street photography, with which to treat your
eyes and mind. Enjoy!
 1/
Street your way
Look beyond the obvious – street
photography is what you make it

If someone asked you to define street photography,

what would you say? The most obvious answer is:
photography that takes place in the street. That’s a
start, though you could equally be photographing
scenes in a park or a café, on the London
Underground or through a bus window, and I believe it
would still count. You’ll find all sorts of different guides
or rules for being a street photographer, in books like
this or in online articles. But the truth is, if you really
want to be thought of as one, you just need to take
candid photographs in public.
 The street is only ever the starting point. It’s up to
you where to go from there.
New York, 2019

For a picture to be ‘candid’, it has to represent a

situation as it unfolded in reality, unposed and
unstaged. You can’t direct the people in the shot to
stand in a particular way and you can’t set things up,
but you can engineer situations in other, subtle ways.
My own movements and actions will have an impact
on the frame I capture. If I want someone staring into
the lens, for example, I might take a step towards
them or ostentatiously lift up my camera. Of course,
there are certain traditions that people associate with
street photography. The generation of postwar
photographers who pioneered the genre would shoot
black-and-white images on a 35mm lens, and that has
shaped a perception of what street photography
should look like – dynamic images portraying fleeting
moments of fast-moving human interaction.
The images I shoot don’t look like classic, fast-paced street
photography.
ABOVE Cambridge, 2020
BELOW New York, 2018
 Fast forward to now and street photography is
hugely influenced by social media. That’s problematic
because it’s quite circular, like a feedback loop where
everyone’s prompted by the same things. Another
common misconception is that, for many, street
photography is synonymous with photographs of
people. While those early trailblazers might have
focused mainly on people, some of the biggest names
among the all-time greats would simply photograph
things on the street that caught their eye – a cup in a
certain shade of red that they just instinctively liked.
They documented what was around them, whatever it
was. Such images aren’t as popular on social media,
so contemporary photographers tend to avoid them
and that’s a shame.

‘For a picture to be “candid”, it has

to represent a situation as it
unfolded in reality, unposed and
unstaged.’
I became a street photographer out of necessity.
When I began taking pictures seriously, I was
squeezing in shoots before shifts at work or during
breaks, so I needed to make the time count. I’d head
out and hit the streets around where I was. My eye
soon acclimatised to this space. I became familiar with
its interesting spots, got a feel for its rhythms, the way
that light would fall at different times. Gradually, I fell in
step with the city. Now it’s like a switch I can’t turn off.
Cutting my teeth as a street photographer in this way
reminded me of my 17 years spent rollerblading. That
taught me how to read the city. It is also the reason I
got my first camera, as a tool to document what my
friends and I were doing. It’s no coincidence that many
of my fellow street photographers, including Matt
Stuart, were once skaters.
 At first, I did street photography in the way I
thought I should and that was in the style of Bruce
Gilden, the first street photographer whose work I
came across. I got right into people’s faces, inches
from the action, using a wide-angle lens and seeking
out random encounters between city dwellers. Over
time, though, I changed my approach. I discovered a
school of street photographers that chimed with my
way of seeing the world – people like the legendary
Saul Leiter and Ernst Haas, who used colour, light and
form to create abstracted works which just happened
to be in the street. At this point, I stopped seeking out
faces and moved to using longer lenses; working with
lenses between 85 and 135mm allowed me to hone
right in on details, until I felt the time had come to
challenge myself by trying something wider again. I
like to keep things fresh.
My background is in illustration and it was only
about three years ago that I began to connect the dots
between that and my approach to street photography.
In the end, that’s why I came to love the work of the
more painterly street photographers, because their
inspirations were exactly the same as mine. They
loved light, texture, layering and colour. I’m obsessed
with colour, as anyone who’s seen much of my work
would tell you, but really it comes down to interesting
composition. I don’t do much post-processing, but I
also don’t have a problem with cropping to get the
composition I’m after. Beyond the basic rule of candid
photography, you can create your own way of working
and that will contribute to a style that is uniquely
yours.
Remember: to be a great street photographer,
don’t allow yourself to be limited or weighed down by
the label. Increasingly, I try not to pigeonhole myself,
instead being open to creativity and seeing where that
takes me. In this book, you can join me on that journey.

‘Create your own way of working

and that will contribute to a style
that is uniquely yours.’
I compose using bold colours and strong shapes,
rather than seeking random moments.
Paris, 2018
 2/
Find your tribe
Test out different street
photography styles and pick one
that suits

L ike so many other rookie street photographers

before and after me, I started out with a fixed idea in
my head of what street photography was about. All I
knew was the brash, in-your-face style of New Yorkers
like Bruce Gilden. I had a basic kit – a Fuji camera
body and a 12mm Samyang Optics lens – and that
shaped how I worked initially. Although I tend not to
shoot like that now, working with a wide-angle lens
forced me to figure out how to engineer myself into a
position that was 50cm (20in) away from someone to
get a shot – a skill that I still find useful from time to
time.
 Images like this appear before your eyes – once
you know the right places to look.
London, 2018

As I got deeper into street photography, I learned

that there are primarily two types of street
photographer, known in the game as ‘hunters’ and
‘fishers’. The up-close, fast-paced street
photographers are the hunters; they pound the
pavements in search of people doing odd things to
give interest to their images. Take Gilden, who is
completely obsessed with characters, or Joel
Meyerowitz, for example. Meyerowitz goes out looking
for unrepeatable moments. He’s not seeking abstract
frames devoid of human figures, he’s thinking people
first and then composing around them. I tend to work
the other way around. I’m more of a fisher. I work more
slowly, waiting for the right composition to bite;
people are usually incidental – the final element in my
frame, rather than the starting point.
Here, humans aren’t the primary focus – I see them more as
compositional elements.
ABOVE Berlin, 2018
BELOW New York, 2018
 I’m not sure where this comes from, but I think it’s
deeply rooted in me. If there’s a group conversation
going on, I’m not looking at people’s faces, but just
seeing everything that’s going on around them. I’ve
always been like that and because I’ve spent my
whole life not really making eye contact, I’m just not
so bothered by it. I’m asking, what are their hands
doing and why? What shoes are they wearing? I
understand the psychology of why faces pull people
into an image, and I know how to play with that, using
elements of faces within advertising to force a viewer
to take a certain route through a shot, but what seizes
my attention when I’m out in the street is probably not
the same as it is for most people.

‘The more you explore, the faster

you will find a style that really
resonates with you.’
Familiarize yourself with the history of street
photography to find where your own interests lie. Go to
museums and look at how artists used light and
shadow in the past, check out what contemporary
photographers are doing by going to gallery shows,
immerse yourself in photo books and websites. Dig
around. Russian photographer Gueorgui Pinkhassov
makes incredible, high-contrast, saturated images,
brilliant silhouettes, but there’s not much of his work
out there. It turns out Pinterest is the best place to see
it.
To understand how these images arise from a
particular way of working, nothing beats watching
street photographers in action. YouTube and other
platforms are full of footage dating back decades
where you can see legends of street photography
practise their craft – it’s an absolutely vital education in
the early days. You might watch some of these videos
and think, ‘Wow, I love that’ or you might conclude that
it’s definitely not your thing, which might lead you
down a different path. The more you explore, the
faster you will find a style that really resonates with
you. I first came across the more painterly approach to
street photography that I favour through American
photographer and filmmaker Ted Forbes, who runs an
excellent YouTube channel called The Art of
Photography.
I stumbled across a couple of names – people like
Saul Leiter and Ernst Haas – and then went on a
mission to find all the content I possibly could about
them and to see everything they’d done. There’s a
documentary by Thomas Leach called In No Great
Hurry: 13 Lessons with Saul Leiter, which came out in
2013, the year Leiter died. There are also plenty of
videos of people talking about Leiter’s work and how it
inspired them, but there is not too much content
available that shows these photographers actually out
shooting and discussing their own processes. The
hunter’s outgoing personality lends itself to that, but
this is not the case for the more introverted, painterly
type. Another photographer I admire, although he’s
not strictly a street photographer, is Jack Davison, but
I’ve only found one interview with him talking about
how he works.

‘I like to be confused by an image

– there’s real magic in that.’
Leiter and Haas are very much in the same camp.
They are painters who just happened to use a camera.
In fact, Leiter always wanted to be a painter and he
didn’t really understand why people cared about his
photography the way they did, even towards the end
of his career when he started to get more recognition.
I suspect he was just criminally humble. What I love
about the work of Leiter and Haas is that it can show
you something in a way you have never seen it before.
I like to be confused by an image – there’s real magic
in that. I want to be intrigued by what it is and how it’s
made.

Don’t confine yourself to one genre. Street

photography, landscape photography, fashion – they
all inform each other. If you draw on influences from
elsewhere, you’ll find your own twist, which will make
your work stand out. William Klein and Leiter both
took on assignments for Harper’s Bazaar and when
you look back through the latter’s archive in particular,
you can’t always tell whether what you’re looking at is
staged or not. In the end it doesn’t matter – it’s just a
beautiful image. It’s not always obvious how
inspiration filters through to your own work.
Undeniably, there will sometimes be a scene or
moment that you have to capture because you know it
reminds you of something. The rest of the time,
however, it all happens within your subconscious.
Reflective surfaces like these are great for getting
your viewers to do a double-take.
London, 2018
Reflective surfaces like these are great for getting your viewers to
do a double-take.
New York, 2018
 3/
Make kit count
All you need is a camera – but one
that you know inside out and back
to front

I ’ll let you into a secret. What you shoot with doesn’t
really matter. You can take mind-blowing street
photography with the smartphone you carry around
every day in your pocket, or, for that matter, with a
cheap toy camera. In 2019, I hit the streets of London
with photography YouTuber Kai Wong, who had a
challenge for me: what kind of photographs could I
produce using a Star Wars branded camera shaped
like a Storm Trooper’s head and marketed to four-
year-old kids in place of my then usual Fujifilm X-Pro2?
It was the ultimate test. How dependent are my
photographic skills on the kit I use? Luckily, I did all
right.
 Familiarity with your kit means you can react to
fleeting light moments like this.
Cambridge, 2019

Of course, using a basic camera or a smartphone

places limitations on what you can do. If you want to
create certain effects, having the ability to change
your lens has an impact, but if you just want to make
images that look good, the most important thing is to
understand the functional possibilities and constraints
of your equipment, whatever they may be – the toy
camera, for example, suffered from an irritating shutter
lag and the image resolution was a mere two
megapixels. The only way you can achieve this is by
spending hours and hours out shooting. Once you
have done that, and seen how the camera reacts in
different situations, using it becomes instinctive. It
feels like an extension of your body.
By excluding the wider scene from the frame, your images could be
shot anywhere.
ABOVE New York, 2018
BELOW Cambridge, 2018
 As with almost any aspect of life today, people are
obsessed with novelty. They think they have to rush
out and buy the latest must-have clothes when they
could just buy something second-hand and get it
tailored. You should always try to make better use of
the things you have. It’s just that advertising exists to
sell us things and make us think we need more. I
always remind myself that if the old masters of street
photography were shooting on film cameras,
capturing at best – if they were quick with their hands
– a couple frames per second and with manual focus,
then I’ve got no excuse with the capacity of the gear
available today.
 ‘Once you have seen how the
camera reacts in different
situations, using it becomes
instinctive. It feels like an
extension of your body.’
At the moment my primary camera is a Sony a7R
IV. The drawback with this camera is that it’s bigger
and heavier than the Fuji cameras I’ve used in the past
and the lenses are more expensive. I found my
previous Fuji more ergonomic and easier to
manipulate, but the image resolution is so high with
the Sony that I can crop to enhance abstraction
without sacrificing quality. I can do whatever I want
with the image files, and they still look great. The
lenses I use most regularly are 50mm and 85mm. This
use came out of necessity. I live in Cambridge, UK,
and almost always go out shooting around the city
centre, which is a small area. If you shot with a wide-
angle lens, so much of the background would enter
into the frame, you’d only be able to shoot the same
street so many times. Even if different things were
happening, the photos would soon begin to look
similar. With a long lens, you can isolate such a small
portion of a scene that you could shoot on the same
street for years, always producing different images.
Kit choice goes hand in hand with your approach
to photography. The human drama-focused hunters,
exemplified by Joel Meyerowitz, tend to use a wide-
angle lens because they want as much going on as
they can squeeze into the shot. Their style is defined
by the lens, with their way of seeing the world
channelled through their focal length. If you gave
Bruce Gilden an 85mm or a 135mm lens, he wouldn’t
make the same work.

I always shoot in ‘aperture priority’. Pretty much

the only choice I make is how much I do or don’t want
to be in focus. Sometimes I’ll do a more creative shot
where I’ll use a slower shutter speed, but beyond that,
I’m really only concentrating on getting the
composition right. I want to make as few decisions as
possible. Is an image ISO 1600 or 3200? I don’t care.
No one is ever going to look at the image and say, it
would have been good if it wasn’t that tiny bit grainy
because the ISO was whatever it was. But is the focus
in the place where I meant it to be? Is the action frozen
and the composition how I wanted it? Those are the
things that matter when I consider if an image has
been successful.

Occasionally, it’s good to shake things up by

giving yourself new restrictions when it comes to focal
length or a camera type you’re completely unfamiliar
with. This forces you to experiment. This explains why
many street photographers stick to prime lenses –
because the limitation of a fixed focal length makes
you more imaginative. You have to use your legs,
make choices, and it’s more interesting. I’ve got a
zoom lens on my camera right now, which I use at the
longer end of its focal range, and I’m not taking
anything else with me. But I will use a wide-angle lens
from time to time. I’ve got to work harder if I want to
simplify a scene, to get something nice and clean with
that – and harder still with a plastic toy camera with
rusty batteries bought for the bargain price of £30.

‘It’s good to shake things up by

giving yourself new restrictions
when it comes to focal length or a
camera type you’re completely
unfamiliar with.’
Restricting technical choices frees me up
creatively to find striking compositions like this.
Cambridge, 2017
 4/
Get out there
Think about when and where to go
– but whatever you do, just go

I n global megacities like London, New York, Tokyo or

Delhi, you’ll never be short of interesting things to
photograph. When you’re starting out, though, that
can make things harder for you. Imagine being a
trainee chef with every ingredient imaginable at your
disposal – you wouldn’t know what to do with them.
But with just three ingredients, you’re good to go. So, if
you’re lucky enough to be in a colossal city, you just
have to deal with it by putting on your metaphorical
blinkers and focusing on one element at a time,
otherwise it is overwhelming. You might want to ease
yourself in by focusing on just one aspect of a subject,
as a way to tell the story of what they do.
 Little details – like this man’s hat, handkerchief and
tie – say a lot about someone.
London, 2018

Hands are great for this. Hands can give clues

about what a person does in ways that their face won’t
necessarily reveal – paint stains that show they’re an
artist or the dusting of flour that suggests they’re a
baker. That tells you all you need to know. Faces, for
me, are a distraction. What I want to portray is
everything else besides. It’s the light hitting a person.
It’s the movement of their clothes. It’s the gesture
they’re making. It’s the composition. As soon as there’s
a face there, psychologically, you’re just hardwired to
look straight at that. And then you miss the rest of it. I
have a shot from 2017, of a guy wearing plastic gloves
– what seemed strange at the time had become fairly
commonplace by 2020, with the Covid-19 pandemic
underway.
Motion blur and billowing steam give these shots a feeling of speed
and texture.
ABOVE Cambridge, 2022
BELOW New York, 2018
 Breaking things down and setting yourself little
tasks makes street photography a lot easier in the
beginning. Then, once you’ve got to grips with that,
you can just walk around looking at other things and
observing the light to see how it changes throughout
the day, or month by month, so that you can plan
when to take the best picture. Apps such as PhotoPills
can help with timing, as not everyone has the luxury of
being able to check out the same spot at, say, 7am,
then again at 9am, 10am, 11am and 12pm. For
example, if you know a spot that would be great with
the light coming in at a certain angle, you can use the
app to look up the exact time of day and/or year that
the light will be right. Then you can make a note of it
and come back at the proposed time. Equally, head to
locations where you can assume interesting things are
likely to happen and research online to find out when
there are public events that you can go to.

If I’m travelling to another city to shoot, I might

check up on local events, but I won’t have anything
too specific in mind. When I’m in New York, shooting
with the locals there, they might take me to unusual
spots they know, but then, on the way, we often get
sidetracked by something totally different. I was there
in October of 2018, and I remember asking where I
could see some steam coming out of pipes in the
ground – it’s a classic New York street shot. As we
were heading to a place one of the guys knew, we
bumped into a truck belonging to Con Edison, the
company that maintains the city’s electric, gas and
steam network. And, right there, was a patch of
ground they’d opened up, some 3m (10ft) wide and at
least as deep, with a crazy chimney of steam rising up
out of it. We just got really lucky there.

‘Breaking things down and setting

yourself little tasks makes street
 photography a lot easier in the
beginning.’
I made my New York connections on Instagram.
Before I went, I published a post saying that I was
going to be there on those dates and asked who else
wanted to shoot. Even if your followers are in the
1,000s, 100s even, you can still build up a network. A
long time ago, when I had hardly any followers, I did a
similar call out before a trip to Barcelona and
someone got in touch telling me their cousin lived
there. I sent them a DM and we met up. It’s a really
easy way to connect with people and find out about
hidden food spots or other places that only insiders
know. This cousin showed me the rooftop of his
apartment block, which was really cool. It didn’t lead
to any shots, but it may well have and offered a way of
seeing the city that wouldn’t have been possible
without that connection.

Being away somewhere and on a single-minded

mission to shoot street photography is one thing, but if
you don’t have a week or so to spend taking pictures,
but more like half an hour here and there, be sure to
take it. The more time you spend out on the streets,
the more you’ll learn your craft and the more likely you
are to get a good shot worth keeping. That’s just
maths. There is a direct relationship between how
many hours you spend on the street and unique
moments happening, but you can’t engineer or predict
when those moments will arise. They are the city’s gift
to you.

‘The more time you spend out on

the streets, the more you’ll learn
your craft and the more likely you
are to get a good shot worth
keeping.’
Find out from locals where to go for interesting
backdrops, like these stone steps in Milan.
Milan, 2017
 5/
Limber up
To get the best street photography
performance, do some warm-up
exercises

T he Canadian architect Frank Gehry doesn’t know

how to use a computer. The way he sparks ideas for
his iconic designs is by free-form sketching.
Sometimes, his pen takes him to a creative dead end;
other times to places that no one would have
predicted. His sketches are by no means accurate and
to most people they look like scribbles, but when he’s
finished a project – the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao,
say, or the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles –
he pulls out these random-looking jumbles of lines
and the resemblance to the finished structure is
uncanny.
 As soon as you get out, start taking pictures. And
sometimes you’ll strike gold.
New York, 2022

Gehry’s line drawings have dual benefits. On the

one hand, they open him up to the possibility of happy
accidents and this is probably how he came up with
some of his best ideas. But they also avoid the blank
canvas feeling that many creatives get. ‘Blank canvas’
might seem an odd reference for a photographer
when the world is out there offering itself up to be
recorded, but we can undergo something similar.
Luckily, we’re living in the digital age, so we can take
thousands of pictures at relatively little cost compared
to buying and processing rolls and rolls of film. And
what might have taken photographers 50 years of
experimenting with different light situations to perfect,
should be much quicker for us to get to grips with.
 The more pictures you take, the more attuned your
eye will become to spot moments like this.
Cambridge, 2018

So, crack on. If you shoot a dud picture, it’s no loss,

you can just review it, delete it and retake it. This gives
you the license to experiment and it also means that,
when you’re out on the streets, you can warm up by
taking test shots, and plenty of them. Think of yourself
as a runner about to hit the track for the 100m final or
an actor about to go on stage in the finale of a sold-
out run. These test shots are your star jumps and
stretches or your blocking and vocal exercises. I did
the same thing when I was studying illustration – I’d
just start making marks on paper. Sometimes it’s good
to set yourself a challenge. Like drawing with your
non-dominant hand, you could start shooting with
your aperture wide open. This all helps your brain to
get into the right mode to take great pictures – it
would be foolish to go straight into it.

‘If you shoot a dud picture, it’s no

loss, you can just review it, delete
it and retake it.’
There’s a noble history of street photographers
doing exactly this. American photographer Garry
Winogrand used to walk out and just compulsively
start hitting the shutter on his camera, literally taking
photos of everything indiscriminately. Over the course
of his life, according to a US documentary about his
work called All Things are Photographable, it’s
estimated that he took more than a million pictures.
Luckily, now, we’re not just burning through film when
we try to do the same.

Personally, I take fewer photos now than I used to

when I was first starting out. It’s partly knowing my city
well and partly that I’ve got pickier. There are times
when I just walk around for an hour without taking any
photographs. On other days, I’ll take photographs that
look like nothing – empty frames, devoid of any
human activity and of little interest whatsoever to
anyone. I don’t care, because these test shots are
exactly that – tests. I see them as disposable and that
frees me up not to worry about getting something
remarkable. Paradoxically, some of my favourite
images have come about this way.
This is a perfect alignment of alternating columns of colour, topped
off with a silhouette profile.
Cambridge, 2022

As you start to improve, you’ll raise your standards

and that will make you more discerning. Now, I can
almost do in my head what the camera would be
doing. I’m constantly observing what is around me and
building up compositions in my mind. If I’m walking
around a scene that I’ve seen many times, on a street I
go down every day, it can be hard to lift a camera to
shoot something unless it is completely out of the
ordinary. My standards have been raised so high that if
something’s not spectacular, I don’t even shoot it. Take
it from me that this is a terrible habit and one that
goes against my own advice! I sometimes need to
remind myself to loosen up and keep experimenting.
But I think that happens to everyone – whether you’re
a street photographer or an actor or an architect. You
always want to keep pushing yourself to make better
work than you’ve made in the past.
The intersection of these buildings set the stage
for the right figure to come along.
Cambridge, 2022
 6/
Scope the scene
Close observation tells you what’s
about to go down, so you’re ready
when it does

I f a door is slightly ajar, something is almost certainly

about to happen. At any moment, a person will walk in
or out. Perhaps as they do, they’ll push the door wide
open so you get a sudden flash of what’s going on
inside. When you hit the streets with your camera, this
is exactly the kind of scenario you need to look out for
– cues that tell you what might be about to unfold.
When you’re warming up, taking random shots, you’re
looking, listening, imbibing absolutely everything in
the street – the noises, the lights, the traffic, the
conversations. The gaggles of tourists, the pigeons,
the changing digital advertising and, of course, the
open doors – they’re all perfect frames within a frame
just waiting for the subject to arrive.
 Looking at this shot, we don’t know whether the
door is opening or closing – we’re intrigued.
London, 2017

The more time you spend observing, the better.

For me, this has become instinctive, and I can never
completely switch off. I’m looking at the light, looking
at shapes and reflections, weighing up how they could
form into compositions. It comes from having trained
my eye over years to view the world from every
imaginable angle. When you’re scoping things out, try
putting your hand over one eye, preferably the
dominant one. You might get some funny looks but
ignore them. By limiting what you see, you start to pick
up on things that you might otherwise miss. For me, it
helps flatten out depth so I can focus on how layers of
foreground, midground and background line up. There
are always at least 10 ways to approach a shot – try
this from a range of angles and eventually you’ll strike
gold.
Achieve a graphic look by using block-colour backgrounds, like
these shutters and boards.
ABOVE London, 2018
BELOW New York, 2018
 When I’m out in my hometown, Cambridge, I’m
always on the alert for what’s new and if it’s a transient
feature of the street, so much the better. The pace of
urban change is phenomenal. Even if you’re in the
same town centre from one day to the next, certain
aspects could look unrecognisable. On one road,
there might be a shop that’s gone out of business and
is being redeveloped so the shopfront is boarded up
while there’s building work being carried out.
Temporarily, that gives you a handy, solid white
background to use for silhouettes. When it comes to
the crowds, the questions I ask myself are things like:
What are people wearing? Where are they standing?
What are they doing? What are they holding? Their
clothes, positions and props are all compositional
elements I can incorporate into shots.

‘When you’re warming up, taking

random shots, you’re looking,
listening, imbibing absolutely
everything in the street.’
In the beginning as a street photographer, you can
feel as if you’re constantly playing catch up with the
city. You see a striking figure, raise the camera, take
the shot and . . . 99 times out of 100 it’s going to result
in the least captivating version of a picture of that
person. But if you walk around first, scoping out the
scene, you can bank potential compositions to keep
up your sleeve – you’ve got a frame in mind with a
vivid red area, a place where there’s good light or a
nice shape in a window. Then, when the perfect
subject happens to be passing, you know which
elements you can work with. So, don’t be lazy, don’t
take the shot straight away. Run up the street, be
primed with your composition and wait for your
subject to come along or, as you get more confident,
you can follow behind them and compose with the
element you had in mind.
Working in pairs is another great way to approach
things when you’re starting out, especially if you’re
timid. Four eyes can be better than two! You can share
observations and it’s interesting to see how the
images you come back with reflect your subjective
ways of seeing the world, even if you’re photographing
the same location. Working alone, you risk getting
tunnel vision about something but when you’re with
someone else, they can point you in the direction of
other shots and offer you a challenge as well. Maybe
they spot something first and jump straight on to the
most obvious composition – if you really want a shot
of that too, you’re going to have to think harder and
find your own way of interpreting it.
If you’ve done the groundwork, when the right
person comes along, you’ll know it.
ABOVE London, 2018
BELOW New York, 2018
 Occasionally, when you’ve scoped out a scene,
your moment doesn’t arrive until days later. On one of
my New York trips, there was a guy standing in front of
me on a subway platform. The train came to a stop
and I shot a few frames with a slow shutter speed just
to capture the blurred train beyond him. And then, a
couple of days later, I was back on the subway
platform and a girl walked in front of me wearing a
bomber jacket emblazoned with the Stars and Stripes.
I remembered that when I’d taken the shot of the
other guy, I’d noticed that every single subway
carriage is painted with the American flag. Instantly, I
realised I should photograph this girl with the train
going by at the same slow shutter speed. I knew there
and then that I’d nailed the better shot.
 7/
Don’t be shy
Be confident and leave your
inhibitions at home, they’ll only
hold you back

T here’s a feeling you sometimes have when you’re

about to take a picture. Your stomach drops and you
get a surge of adrenaline, a fight-or-flight response.
You might experience it as a social anxiety. Your mind
might start racing, firing off questions . . . What will that
person think of me? How do I get myself into the right
position without attracting attention? Is this a good
idea? That is your brain telling you that you’re looking
at something compelling, something you must
photograph. It’s your cue to run forward and hit the
shutter.
 You can’t quite tell here if the subject is looking at
you or not. There’s a sense of mystery to it.
Cambridge, 2017

Whenever I do workshops, beginners always ask

me how to deal with that awkwardness? Everybody
goes through it at the start, but you must get past it.
Anyone who’s been shooting on the street for a while
will have faced a moment like this. If they’ve pushed
through, they will have come out the other side a
different photographer. Even if you don’t and then go
on to specialise in photographing people, you know
that in 10 years’ time if you see a rare and interesting
scene involving a person or some people that you
absolutely must capture, you’re not going to miss it
out of shyness. Because you’ve made that leap
already.

Stand proud. If you’re self-assured, people don’t question or even

notice what you’re doing.
ABOVE New York, 2019
BELOW New York, 2019
 I remember my awkward moment. There was a
bus driver staring daggers at me, straight into the lens.
I was on my bike, on my way home from work, when I
rode past him. I braked, jumped off and headed back.
I’d made this agreement with myself earlier that if I
pulled the brakes for even a split second thinking this
might be a good shot, I had to stop. Otherwise, I knew
I’d find myself stewing with regret. This was the first
time I followed through on that. At the time, it’s like
there are two parts of you battling it out – the
photographer, who just wants the shot, and the human
thinking, ‘This is going to be weird, uncomfortable or
dangerous.’ If taking a shot is dangerous, you must
listen to that instinct, but if it’s just uncomfortable, you
have to get over it.

‘If you act as if you’re doing

something wrong, people will
respond to you as though that’s
the case.’
It could be, as in my case with the bus driver, a
situation where you feel some hostility or it could just
be tricky engineering yourself into the right spot to get
the composition you want. For some pictures to work,
you want the person to look directly into the lens, so
you need to step forward and get their attention to
make that happen. Know that the shot is worth more
than a stranger’s opinion of you. They might just think,
‘Oh, that guy was weird. Who cares?’ In seven years of
doing this, I’ve only ever encountered one person who
was angry. I’ve only been asked to delete a picture on
two occasions, and both times it was all very polite.
You need to understand the effect of your body
language. Avoid looking casual or lazy – like having
one hand in your pocket, for example. If you act as if
you’re doing something wrong, people will respond to
you as though that’s the case. A simple smile goes a
long way – I’ve got a shot from New York where the
entire frame is filled with guys in suits holding
umbrellas. But there were two people with them who
weren’t in suits and I didn’t want to include them in the
picture because they’d detract from it. To get the shot,
I positioned myself between them and the suits. I
turned round, caught their eyes and smiled. They saw
that it was an interesting scene, too, and when I was
done, they even asked me for a copy. If there’s a stag
do or similar going on, you’ll often find that one person
in the group sees you taking the photo – but they’re in
on the joke. They’re willing you on, thinking, ‘I want
there to be a photo of this because it’s funny.’ And then
you can get right into the frame. It’s about observing,
interpreting any given situation and playing off that.
But you can use all sorts of tricks. Occasionally,
someone will spot that I’ve made eye contact with
them accidentally while I’m getting an idea of what my
composition is going to be and I don’t want them to be
looking into the lens. But if I pick up the camera at that
moment, that’s exactly what’s going to happen. So, I
try to go incognito. I might walk past them, wait a few
seconds and then double back on myself to quickly
get the shot or I might get my phone out and hang
there for long enough that I’ve melted into the
background, almost becoming part of the street
furniture. Once they forget you’re even there, you can
take the shot and then off you go.
You can switch up the power dynamics, too. Say
you frame up something so you’ve got your
composition ready, and you’re waiting for someone to
walk through to complete the shot. In this situation,
people are aware of what you are doing and if they
walk through, that’s their choice, so you can take as
many shots as you want. But in some places, like the
UK, people are inherently polite. You might be waiting
for a subject to walk through your composition, but
they see you with your camera, and stop, wary that
they’re going to ruin the shot. In situations like this, I
tend to drop the camera and give them a friendly grin
to reassure them it’s okay for them to walk on. Then,
the second they get level with me, I lift up the camera
again and take the shot. That’s the easiest one when
you’re starting out – framing up first and letting people
walk through. There’s no risk there at all because it’s
obvious what you’re doing.
Getting more confident on the street comes from
spending time there. You don’t even need to have a
camera with you. You can just walk around, watching
the world. Athletes and gamers talk about being ‘in
the zone’ and this is not so different. There’s a point at
which you spend enough time in a space that you
start understanding what’s about to happen and you
can subconsciously pre-empt it. Eventually, you just
get a gut feeling that makes you lift the camera at the
right time and it all flows together.
After a while, you don’t give people much thought.
You and they are simply part of the scene.
London, 2017
Sometimes embracing social tension is the making
of a shot; other times it’s best to blend in.
ABOVE London, 2018
BELOW Cambridge, 2018
‘If taking a shot is dangerous, you
must listen to that instinct, but if
it’s just uncomfortable, you have to
get over it.’
 8/
Spot one-offs
Keep your eyes peeled for
unreproducible occurrences,
whether human or otherwise

I n 1967, a man tripped over and fell on a Parisian

pavement, landing flat on his back. Legendary
American street photographer Joel Meyerowitz was
right there, Leica in hand, to capture the immediate
aftermath – a cyclist turning back amid the traffic to
see what had happened, a workman stepping gingerly
over the man as he lay in the street. More than five
decades on, the New Yorker looks back on this as one
of the photographs that makes him most proud. It’s a
scene where not much is happening and yet
everything is happening – the drama of life
crystallised by the varying reactions of different
passers-by offers an insight into how humans relate to
one another – or not – when they live, as many of us
do, in a big city.
 The drama in this shot would be lost if I’d hit the
shutter a split second before or after.
London, 2017

Fallen Man, as the shot is known, is exactly the

kind of random instance that people picture when
they think of street photography. In some ways, it’s a
very different approach to mine. Instead of hunting for
these mini urban dramas, I tend to build up
compositions creatively using colour, shape and
geometry, including human figures to finish off the
shot. Randomness does play a role in my work,
though. Sometimes I’ll have a strong composition
preformed and then, by luck, someone or something
completely unique comes along. But, equally, being in
the habit of preemptively building those compositions
makes me much faster at reacting to a unique
moment when I see it – say, in cases where I spot an
event unfolding from afar and have to run to capture
the shot. Either way, I don’t hang around. I don’t usually
wait more than half an hour – I’d rather just come back
another day.
 I hit the jackpot when this man looked up from
under his umbrella as the ambulance passed.
New York, 2019

‘Ask yourself what possibilities you

have for composition at that
precise time.’
 There’s a picture that I made on a trip to New York
that is a good example of how I work with chance. I
was standing on the street as an ambulance came by.
The ambulance stopped, I took some shots of a girl in
a car with the ambulance’s red light shining through
the window. I thought, ‘That’s that,’ and wandered on
until I saw this guy standing under an umbrella by the
entrance to the NBC building. I wondered, what can I
compose with this? Just then, the ambulance took off
again. By that point, I had the composition ready, I
didn’t even need to look! I could hear the siren, I knew
what was going to happen. But my intention was also
obvious to the man outside the NBC building and he
kept dropping his umbrella so it covered his face.
Every now and then he’d lift it up to check if I was still
pointing the camera at him and, just one of those
times, the flashing red light hit his face and everything
came together perfectly. I was probably there for 30
seconds, but it was enough.
Another is a photograph of a woman in a niqab so
that only her eyes are showing, who happens to be
standing right by an advertisement that has been torn
to reveal another pair of eyes. I was in London, out
shooting with another photographer, when I took this.
Like the previous example, it’s a combination of
setting things up, putting myself in the right place and
then the unpredictable process of waiting for a person
to complete the shot. In fact, there was a slightly
stronger composition to have had here, but there was
just no way to get it at the time because of the
position we were in. If we had been further back, we
could also have included some text on the ad which
read ‘watch this space’. The other photographer came
back the next day and waited for three and a half
hours to get a shot with that in the frame and another
woman in a niqab staring straight down the lens.

In the early days, when something cool happens

and you don’t get the shot, you might kick yourself for
missing it. Maybe you didn’t have the camera in your
hands, or switched on, or you weren’t quick enough off
the mark. It can be gutting. But the chances are, three
seconds later the person will do exactly the same
thing. People repeat behaviours all the time. It’s
always worth lifting the camera again on the off-
chance. I remember missing a shot of a couple kissing
on the London Underground. When they kissed, their
faces disappeared behind one of the poles for
passengers to hold on to. I thought they wouldn’t do
that again, but picked up my camera anyway, and they
did! There have been other times when I’ve found a
glass door to shoot through, waited patiently for
something to appear on the other side and when,
finally, someone puts their hand on it, they take it away
– only to put it back seconds later, making my
frustration thankfully short-lived.
More often than not, the random factor in an
image of mine does not come down to people. It
could relate to a light source or some animated
signage. What counts is that it’s something that will
never occur again in exactly the same way – there is
no chance that another photographer could come
along and reproduce the same shot. It’s about
originality. I’ve sat there, poised, waiting for the
moment it changes. But not all random moments
make great pictures. You have to ask yourself what
possibilities you have for composition at that precise
time. There might be someone doing something
interesting, but the background behind them is messy.
The moment simply won’t stand out. No matter how
unusual the scene unfolding in front of you, that alone
won’t cut it. The shot has to be well composed. Always
ask yourself what potential compositions you have
available.

Find an advert or stretch of street that speaks to you and play with
scenarios in your head.
ABOVE London, 2017
BELOW Cambridge, 2018
 9/
See in retrospect
Give your work staying power by
featuring indicators of the present
that may soon be past

S ometimes I think the smartphone is the curse of

the contemporary street photographer because I like
my images to have a kind of timeless quality. This is
why I love umbrellas, and I’m not the only one. Many
street photographers love shooting in the rain,
because people put their phones away. They have
their hands full, they’re doing things, moving at a
quicker pace, there’s activity . . .
 Are there visual cues that could place this image in
a particular time period – or not?
New York, 2019

Don’t get me wrong, a photograph in which a

smartphone makes an appearance can still be a good
picture. There’s no reason to ignore them completely
– after all, they are a feature of life today. You might be
working in low light and take a nice shot where the
phone screen is lighting up someone’s face. That’s
something that just wouldn’t have happened before
the 2000s. But someone standing on the street, just
looking at their phone, isn’t interesting. There needs to
be more . . . It could be that they’re looking at
something interesting and it’s reflected in their
glasses. There’s a big university campus near me and
a few times passing by, I’ve spotted five, six, seven
people all in a line, all with exactly the same body
language – head tilted down, neck bent over, on their
phones – although I’m yet to get a shot of it.
These shots have a historical relevance that comes from looking at
them as if from the future.
ABOVE New York, 2018
BELOW Paris, 2018
 That’s interesting because it shows a pattern of
behaviour that is characteristic of our time. Try to look
at the scenes in front of you through an imaginary
future viewfinder. Ask yourself, what someone 10 or 50
years from now would notice if they were looking at
this shot. To go back to smartphones, a single shot of a
person with their phone is nothing! There are
countless similar shots from the 1990s to the present
day. It’s only interesting if the person themself is
interesting. Are they wearing something typical of that
time? Are they carrying an oversized boombox?
Technology and fashion, along with street signage, are
guaranteed to look retro quickly. Although this isn’t at
the forefront of my work, it’s something I consciously
look out for, especially if I can use it in subtle ways,
like in my 2018 shot of a man in a dark trilby hat
marching through Paris, surrounded by 19th-century
architecture, and with first-generation Apple AirPods
just visible in his ears.

‘Try to look at the scenes in front

of you through an imaginary future
viewfinder.’
In a way, I’m thinking about the long-term
significance of an image. It might be looked back on
and seen as valuable even if it’s something that I don’t
care about now. Maybe when I’m gone, it’s the kind of
image that might make it into a book one day because
it shows such a stark contrast to the way things have
turned out. I’ve got a whole bunch of shots from Times
Square, of people holding up placards with religious
slogans on them. There is one where someone is
holding a placard saying ‘Jesus can help’ in front of an
advert featuring a guy asking for help to fund a new
kidney. In another one, a woman is holding a sign with
lots of raised arms on it. Her fingers are the same size
as one of these little arms. At the time, I just thought it
looked funny. But who knows what’ll happen in the
future? The political climate might change and then it
will have a different meaning. In the UK, the
government is in the process of restricting protest in
public spaces – perhaps there will come a time when
we never see that again.

It’s the same as people smoking on a plane. Once

commonplace, this seems really weird now. You need
to develop a sense of what might evolve. Cities are
always shape-shifting. That’s what makes them such a
magnet for photographers. There’s a photograph of
the flagship HMV store in London’s Oxford Street that
street photographer Stephen Leslie took in 2018. It
shows a man standing outside the grand store in the
snow, wearing a bowler hat and a dapper coat. Above
him, is the classic HMV sign. Leslie took another shot
of the store, using exactly the same frame, in 2022.
With HMV now long gone, the shop is now a lowly
sweet shop and all that’s left of the former grandeur is
a flash of colour from the old sign.
If you went to the West End of London and took a
lazy shot of someone just standing there, in five years’
time it would look different. But there’ll be plenty of
shots like that. To ensure your images stand the test of
time, try to propose something interesting, something
that nobody else will have seen or done. Make them
work harder.

‘Ask yourself, what someone 10 or

50 years from now would notice if
they were looking at this shot.’
Don’t take your city for granted. In a flash, it will
change and so will its characters.
London, 2017
 10/
Own your shot
Decide what your image is focused
on and use your composition to
take the viewer there

J ust because you’re a candid photographer, that

doesn’t mean you’re passively observing the world
around you. The four edges of your frame – where you
situate them in relation to what you are looking at, how
you line up what’s inside them – represent your
creative choices. More than anything else,
composition is what makes or breaks a photograph.
An interesting event poorly composed is nothing. It’s
wasted. A mundane moment could become
extraordinary in the hands of a photographer with a
trained eye. So, get to grips with the basics of
composition and use these tools to send your viewer
on a visual journey.
 Composing an image is about arranging elements
to inform viewers where their eyes should go.
London, 2017

A quick Google search throws up pages of articles

telling you the ‘rules of composition’. There are
hundreds of them. The principle behind them all is
that, instead of simply framing up a subject dead
centre (although this sometimes works – all rules are
there to be broken), you give careful thought to
directing someone’s eye around a frame so that they
see what you consider to be the most important
element. Good composition is also about giving a
picture a feeling of balance, so it just intuitively looks
right. My shots don’t tend to ‘tell a story’, but I do like
to create intrigue and this is how I do that. ‘Leading
lines’, for example, is about using the lines in a scene
to point the viewer’s gaze to the main subject – they
may be architectural or created by the movement of
people’s bodies or the shape of the landscape.
 Use buildings, figures or vehicles – like this bus –
to break up the frame into segments.
Cambridge, 2018

Start off by setting yourself a challenge each day

to make an image using a particular rule. In time, you’ll
find there are rules that naturally chime with you and
you’ll use them without a second thought. Or maybe
you’ll look back through your archive and notice that
you always use the ‘rule of thirds’ or the ‘rule of odds’
unconsciously. I have a shot, for instance, that shows
the edge of an old, red Routemaster London bus that
fills most of the frame. I could have achieved a cleaner
composition, but I deliberately included this edge
because it leads you down the image towards where
the subject is, a man, almost silhouetted in the frame
of the bus window. There’s another leading line that
takes you across the image the other way. Sometimes
a little bit of imperfection is great if it does what you
need.

‘More than anything else,

composition is what makes or
breaks a photograph.’
Pretty consistently, I make a similar type of
composition, where there’s maybe a quarter or a third
of the frame blocked out by something on the near
side. It’s almost always because there’s just an ugly
element in the frame that I don’t like, or I’m at a
junction and deliberately blocking out the street to my
right by hiding around the corner. I’m always looking
to simplify scenes to create minimalist, unusual
images where colour, light and shapes dominate.
People often make a composition too obvious by
focusing on the – usually human – subject. Say you’re
walking down the street following a great subject that
isn’t going to disappear suddenly. The street’s maybe
100m (300ft) long, so you have plenty of time to make
all the necessary decisions and compose your shot. If
you don’t want the street to feature in the image, you
don’t have to include it. It’s that simple. It’s your choice
what you do and don’t include.

Don’t feel limited by what you find in front of you.

There are so many elements around a street. You can
use anything to obscure distractions – hoarding,
lampposts, even other people. Working in the same
small place day in, day out, you can block out
identifiable elements to create different images.
Longer lenses are ideal for that. The longer the lens
you use, the more you can focus on little details, and
the more this brings out in your foreground. I don’t see
a long lens necessarily as a way of getting closer, I see
it as a creative tool. It means I can include multiple
layers between me and the thing I want to
photograph. I am always trying to get the best version
of the image, doing as much editing of the content as
possible in-camera.
A picture I took of some kids sitting on a swing
installation at London’s Tate Modern is a good
illustration of how I compose. There are four different
lines from a pole, a railing, the swing’s structure and
the building. Together they produce a box around the
children, which leads in a spiral towards them in the
centre. The viewer is being completely drawn around
the frame. This demonstrates how I use ‘leading lines’
as well as sub-framing, which I’ll discuss in more detail
later (see Chapter 12). In this situation, I found the
frame first. Apart from that spot, the scene was messy,
so I composed the shot before anyone ever sat down.
The installation was in the middle of Tate Modern and
people had been shooting there loads while it was up.
But no one had got anything really good. I knew my
shot represented the cleanest version of the entire
area, so I just framed up and waited until the picture
came.
Understanding the rules is a great place to start.
After a while, you’ll be taking pictures and everything
will feel right, and the reason it feels right is because
you’re following some kind of rule. It doesn’t matter
how you get there when you’re starting out – you can
just shoot interesting moments and then crop in post.
This way, you can move the image around to make it
fit the rule and help you better understand it for the
next time you’re out shooting. Either option is going to
work. At the beginning, you don’t want to think about
everything at once. You’ll probably be figuring out
exposure and how your camera works. You’ll be
looking for moments, you’ll be looking for colour –
there’ll be so much going on, that some of the
decisions fall by the wayside.

‘A mundane moment could

become extraordinary in the hands
of a photographer with a trained
eye.’
By selectively isolating the swing within my frame,
I produced a more interesting image.
London, 2017
Photography is about dark, as well as light. In
these compositions, shadow guides the eye.
ABOVE London, 2021
BELOW New York, 2018
 Eventually, however, you will find yourself
gravitating towards certain rules. For me it’s the rule of
thirds. I didn’t set out to use it but, over time, I’ve come
to realise that it’s in many of my images. You’ll do the
same. You’ll be thinking about a few of the rules and
trying to compose like that. And then one day, you’ll
take an image you really love. Then you’ll dissect it to
find out why it works so well. Maybe it’s because there
are five subjects in the frame and it fits the ‘rule of
odds’. Maybe there’s a bright red element off-centre
and it’s that colour that attracts you. People don’t
often take the time to sit back and take their images
apart like that. But if you do, you’ll make the
connection. You’ll discover what it is that makes your
work distinctive. And then you’ll see images you like
wherever you go.
 11/
Contrast to intrigue
Engage the viewer with striking
juxtapositions

T here’s a shot I took in London of a guy dressed up

and looking really dapper. The top half of the frame is
entirely red because a bus is passing in front of him.
He’s got his hands behind his back and looks exactly
like a character you might see in an old Vivian Maier
shot from the middle of the last century. Except that
he’s got a smartphone clasped in his hand and a
medical facemask hanging off his fingers. These little
anchors root the image in the present. But it’s the
contrast between them and his timeless attire that
gives it the edge. Cambridge, the city where I live and
shoot most of the time, is steeped in tradition –
historic college buildings from as far back as the
1200s, academics or students donning gowns and
mortarboards for graduation ceremonies. That’s not
my focus. But if I see someone dressed in an old-
fashioned three-piece suit with headphones hanging
out of their fancy waistcoat, I’m interested.

Suit, smartphone – and medical facemask.

Contradictions can make an image stand out.
London, 2021
We look because we are curious. Images like these pose more
questions than they answer.
ABOVE Cambridge, 2018
BELOW Cambridge, 2021
 Juxtaposition creates intrigue. My images don’t
work by spelling out a whole narrative – what they do
instead is to alert the viewer’s curiosity and make
them ask questions. You don’t only have to look at
people, their clothes or their behaviour, to find this.
The most basic form of contrast at your disposal is
light and shadow. I’m always looking at that first and
foremost and you’ll notice that I use silhouettes
regularly in my pictures for this reason. One example is
an image from July 2021. I shot it in Cambridge, but it
could be anywhere, because the content of the image
is so stripped back. It shows a man in a hat against a
band of light in the middle of the frame, with looping
patterns from the window of Virgin Bank, which was in
the process of undergoing a refit, also shooting out
shadows around him. It’s a very minimalist, graphic
picture, but if you’re dealing with something busier, try
switching your camera settings to monochrome. That
way you’ll be able to see more clearly whether a
particular composition offers interesting intersections
between bright and dark areas.

‘Speculate about the best scenario

for making a shot and play it out in
your head.’
The advantage of working with colour is that it
offers you a wider range of elements to play with
when you’re creating juxtaposition. There are times
when including or excluding the tiniest snatch of
colour can make or break an image. You can direct
someone’s eye around a frame by contrasting one
colour with another. Other times, the juxtaposition is
actually a repetition – the striped jumper a woman is
wearing that echoes the stripes of some shutters she
is strolling past, say, or someone’s scarlet nail polish
that picks up the bright red of the rail an anonymous
Tube passenger is leaning against. A hypothetical
composition I had teed up for a while came to fruition
in a 2018 shot that shows a set of people all in red
walking past a red postbox in Cambridge. I had
earmarked the post box, as I love the colour red and
knew that it would make a great shot if I could bring
other red elements into the frame. It was a real touch
to capture these passers-by as a group because they
weren’t actually together. The man was on his own,
walking much faster than the other two people. It was
fortuitous for me that the timing worked out to
position them that way.

Many street photographers like a witty

juxtaposition, usually involving humans. The best-
known example of this type of shot is dubbed ‘balloon
head’ – someone, most likely a child, is holding a
balloon which somehow ends up completely
obscuring their face and it looks as if the balloon is
their head. No doubt that’s an image you’ve come
across a few times. To make your images stand out,
you need to push that concept further, do something
original. There is an image of mine showing some kids
on the top deck of a bus. The windows are steamed
up and the kids are amusing themselves by drawing
pictures in the condensation. By coincidence, just
underneath them there’s an advertisement for the
2017 Matt Damon movie Downsizing, which features
the words ‘miniature masterpiece’. Now, that’s the
definition of a one-off moment but it’s also something
that you could predict might happen once you’d seen
the advert and the steamed windows. Without those
words, the image would have fallen flat.
When you’re walking your usual routes around the
city, keep your eyes peeled for things that you could
use to create interesting juxtapositions. Maybe there’s
a billboard or some digital screens featuring some text
or an image – the words ‘look up’, for example, or a set
of eyes or some lips. With text, you can almost edit on
the spot by framing up, so that you cut out certain
words and focus on those that are relevant. Speculate
about the best scenario for making a shot using this
and play it out in your head. Maybe it’s a particular
kind of person, or a person moving their body in a
certain way. If you have these in mind, you can hang
around or return sometime later in the hope that you’ll
be ready when the right person turns up.
Contrast and the ‘rule of thirds’ often go together.
Juxtaposed elements can occupy different portions of
the frame – by mentally breaking it up into constituent
parts, you can give it punch through placement. A
good way to finesse your technique is to find
something interesting that you know isn’t going
anywhere, frame up and sit tight until your best-case
scenario happens. I still do this myself. In Cambridge
there’s an advert for cosmetics where someone has
stuck a white sticker over one eye. I keep returning to
it, hoping someone with an eye patch will come past,
but it hasn’t happened yet. Another way to practise
this is by looking back through shots you’ve already
taken and think about what funny little elements
would finish them off perfectly? Once you’ve got the
hang of that, you can start to incorporate more
unpredictable moving elements in your shots. Instead
of having one person doing something surprising, you
could get several, like in this shot of street food truck
vendors giving directions to a customer – they all
point in unison, neatly finished off with the word
‘welcome’. Contrast conspires with every other
component of a well-thought out composition to give
your viewer a reason to look.

‘My images alert the viewer’s

curiosity and make them ask
 questions.’

Cities are full of words. Experiment with adverts or placards to give

your shots a witty edge.
ABOVE Cambridge, 2018
BELOW New York, 2018
A playful variant of the classic ‘balloon head’, but
here the balloon is a pendant lampshade.
Cambridge, 2019
Asking for directions isn’t itself unusual, but the sight of three
people pointing is comic.
Cambridge, 2006
 12/
Frame within a frame
Make order out of chaos by boxing
your subject in

D oors, windows, lampposts, shards of light – in a

photograph, anything can become a sub-frame. I first
came across this compositional technique looking at
other people’s work and it’s one I use all the time. It’s
playful but also incredibly useful, offering a way to rid
an image of unwanted visual clutter. For me, working
in the same handful of streets most of the time, that’s
a necessity, a way to continue making images that
look fresh, rather than showing the same scenes on
repeat. At first, it became an obsession and now I do it
without giving it a second thought. It’s one of the
reasons why I love rainy days. Umbrellas create nice
shapes that move in and out of shot, giving you
opportunities to create different sub-frames with
them.
 This doorway is the ideal frame within a frame. It
was just a case of waiting for the subjects.
Milan, 2017

As with the ‘balloon head’ trope (see here), there is

a basic version of sub-framing that involves
photographing a person through a window. It could be
the open window of a café or a steamed-up car
window. Doors have the same effect. Take an image I
shot in 2017, in Pirelli HangarBicocca, an art gallery in
Milan in a former industrial building. It shows two
figures framed up in a tall doorway between two
rooms within the gallery. That’s an example of a sub-
frame that’s just given to you. If you had been in that
spot and not taken the shot, I’m not sure what it is
you’d have been looking at. I think it works so well
because of the strong contrast.
 There’s no limit to what you can use to sub-frame –
this umbrella handle worked a treat.
London, 2017

Everything is in darkness except for the doorway

and there is something about the man and the child,
the way they are standing, their gesture, that makes
you curious. It may not be my most original shot, but
it’s certainly pleasing to look at. Sometimes, as in that
Milan shot, people are surrounded by the frame; other
times, you can create the illusion of this by the way
you position yourself when you take the picture. You
can bring layers or other elements into the scene to
block out certain portions of what you can see and
give the appearance of a frame. There’s a picture I
took in Trafalgar Square, where you can see Nelson’s
Column against a blue sky broken up with fluffy
clouds through the sub-frame of a man’s umbrella
handle. Nelson was my static element and I just
waited until the man fortunately moved into the
position where I could get the shot as I had imagined
it. Another time, I was leading the participants of a
workshop that I was running to another location when
I chanced on this picture, where you can see a man’s
face perfectly framed in the mirror of his motorbike.
Again, this was a case of thinking ahead and knowing
that the only time someone’s face is going to be
positioned right in the mirror is if they’re sitting on the
bike. It’s also a reminder never to put your camera
away because you don’t know what gems lie right
around the corner.
 ‘Umbrellas create nice shapes that
move in and out of shot, giving you
opportunities to create different
sub-frames with them.’
I’ll use anything to create a sub-frame. I’ve taken a
picture of a market trader with his hands on his head,
shooting through his arm to create a triangular frame.
In another one, which took me several attempts, you
can just see someone’s face in a circular hole in a road
sign. I spotted the sign in town, and knew that it
wouldn’t be of interest to anyone else. It was in a high
traffic spot, so I knew someone would eventually stop
where I needed them to be and look round. I would
have plenty of time to thread the needle. After several
10-minute-long visits to the spot, someone did stop
and I had maybe 10 seconds to get the shot. This
wouldn’t work with a wide-angle lens because it
would bring in too much else. That said, you can still
sub-frame if you are working with a wide angle; you
just need to be bolder and bring in larger elements to
block out greater portions of the frame.
Some sub-frames I have ready to go for weeks; others are spur-of-
the-moment discoveries.
ABOVE London, 2017
BELOW Cambridge, 2017
 A good way to practise sub-framing is by framing
a shot as you would normally and then considering
which elements you could subtract to make it cleaner,
the subject more contained. Alternatively, go out and
find 10 things in your city that would make good sub-
frames. Keep a note and take your chance when you
see a good subject heading for one of those frames.
You can shoot through corners of buildings, the space
between a sign and a wall, a bike stand. Maybe sub-
framing will appeal to you, maybe not. You’ll only find
out by experimenting. Street photography teaches you
about yourself. There are some photographers whose
images are kinetic, dynamic. They are hooked on
motion and that is their way of trying to make sense of
the world. I find that approach too noisy, it’s too much
to take in. I want to tidy everything up and put it in a
box within a box. Sub-framing appeals to my natural
neatness; my need to create order out of chaos.
 13/
Mix up perspective
Make your viewers do a double-
take and they will start to see the
city differently

I love to be confused. What I mean when I say that, is

that I like an image to keep me guessing for a while. If I
can shoot something that makes people wonder how I
did it, that’s a mission accomplished for me. It all
comes down to originality. Almost everyone has a
camera these days. The cities in which we live have
never been so photographed. By finding a different
angle, a different perspective, you will show people
something they have seen before in an original way.
Perhaps, for example, you shoot something in the
distance, the whole frame in focus, avoiding any of the
foreground elements that help the viewer to situate it
in terms of relative depth, so the image becomes flat
with nothing to signify if the objects, buildings or
people we are looking at are nearer or further away in
relation to each other. If sub-framing was about
organisation, this is about confusion. Let me explain . . .

This shot resembles a collage but it’s a trick of the

eye, created in-camera using reflections.
New York, 2019
 Shot through a bus stop, this image is like a visual
conundrum, and that makes it compelling.
New York, 2018

Fifth Avenue, New York, has been captured by

street photographers for more than a century. Who
knows how many photographs have been taken there,
in the last week alone? When I was shooting there, I
noticed the reflective overhang of an H&M store
where you can see a mirror image of the pedestrians
below. I decided to point my camera upwards. The
resulting shot is mind-bending, a visual riddle that
takes some concentration to unpack. I’m pretty sure
that it has been repeated by a few other people since.
Ideally, I would have preferred there to be nothing in
the foreground, so that you really had no reference
points. But even so, it takes a while to figure out what
you’re looking at. You can’t see the street level but
there’s a lamppost. And once you get it, everything
makes sense. You can flatten out the image to the
point that it is impossible to dissect what is in the
frame. Then, aesthetically, you have made a great
abstract shot. It’s beautiful because of the colours, the
shapes, the composition and no one even tries to
figure it out. That still has value, there’s no reason not
to do that. But for me, it’s more interesting if you have
a hint so people can enjoy the puzzle.

‘By finding a different angle, a

different perspective, you will
 show people something they have
seen before in an original way.’
New York is a city of tall buildings, a place where it
can pay to climb up high. Cambridge is famously flat
and low architecturally. There are barely more than
two storeys anywhere. What you can do, though,
wherever you are, is look up. Looking down is an
obvious one – we’ve all seen images of puddles and
feet – but people don’t seem to be in the habit of
looking up. The same goes for looking behind you. If
you’re walking, you could be out shooting for a whole
day, and never look back. There could be an
incredible subject literally right there and you’d miss it.
As the H&M example demonstrates, there are also
interesting surfaces to be found above eye level. I’m
more interested in the shapes of buildings above the
street than their frontage. The tops of buildings also
provide you with more contrast.
In another picture I made in New York, in 2020, the
first two-thirds of the frame are filled with the
turquoise face of a woman. It’s one of the images that
people message me about the most, wanting to know
what they’re looking at. I made it entirely in-camera by
shooting against a reflection on the back of a bus stop
with an illuminated advert on the inside. People often
assume it must be a double exposure. They try to
reverse-engineer what I’ve done and that’s what they
come up with. A really well-known image of mine, and
one that many people have tried to replicate is my
‘floating hat’. That one isn’t just about being in the right
place at the right time, it’s about using the light to
create a surreal illusion. At certain times of the year,
the light in the Lion Yard Shopping Centre in
Cambridge comes in through a roof with a lattice
pattern, creating diamond-shaped spots of light on
the floor. The exit in the distance leads on to a street
that is in full shadow, so you end up with what is
essentially a frame with a dark backdrop and
spotlighting. Then you just need the right subject and
the invisible man appears.
There is a photographer from Barcelona called
Pau Buscató whose method is really grounded in
juxtaposition. He has a shot that I’ll never forget. It
shows a building site in London. Four birds in flight are
printed on the construction hoarding. Your eye follows
their line to see a bird-shaped rip in some white
netting and, just above the rip is a real pigeon flying
past. What you see at first glance is six birds in flight.
It’s one of those images you stare at before you realise
what you’re actually seeing. At first, I thought, ‘That’s
cool’. Then, ‘That can’t be real.’ Then I got it. That kind
of image goes down well on social media because it
stops people for a minute. But it can also work in a
gallery space or a book. Any time you can stop
someone flicking through the pages or walking
around the room and take a bit more time to look at
something, you’ve won.
Light can create natural distortions, from water-like ripple effects to
the illusion of invisibility.
ABOVE Cambridge, 2017
BELOW London, 2018
 14/
Follow the light
Allow yourself to be led by the light
– it’s what makes your images
come alive

T he word ‘photography’ translates from Greek as

‘drawing with light’ and this lies at the root of
everything I do. Light is, without fail, the very first thing
I think about – before leading lines, contrast, sub-
framing, perspective, and certainly before people –
and it completely determines my schedule. The most
remarkable moment on the street is insignificant if the
lighting doesn’t do it justice. In fact, my photography
heroes – Saul Leiter and Ernst Haas – aren’t noted for
the remarkable moments they captured but for their
painterly approach to light and colour.
 This shaft of illumination created a natural
spotlight. I had to capture its theatrical effect.
London, 2017

Leiter was an absolute magician with the light.

Many of my favourite shots of his weren’t taken on
sunny days, but on rainy, snowy, cold days where
condensation covers the windows. Equally impactful,
in 1955 Haas took an extraordinary photograph, in
portrait orientation, of the side of an epic New York
skyscraper, its gigantic steel form glinting in the
sunlight. The rectangular shadows of other buildings
act like steps, leading you down from the top of the
skyscraper to the bottom of the frame and the single
red circle of a traffic light. Everything in the image pulls
you towards that red light. Haas was a genius for
noticing that it was the light that made the
composition. I often wonder when he’d spotted it.
Maybe he realised a week prior, but the sun’s position
wasn’t quite right or perhaps he spotted it as it was
and was really that lucky, who knows? The best times
of day to shoot are in the evening or the morning.
That’s when shadows cut across windows or buildings,
giving you strong shapes to work with. I prefer to shoot
first thing in the morning. You see interesting things
and different people that you’d miss at other times of
day. Also, as I started shooting around a day job, it
allowed me to be more productive, to learn about the
light and to know what scenes would be well lit. I
would move around the city, paying attention to how
the light struck certain spots, and thinking about how
that would change so that I could revisit them at
different times. Sometimes, if I don’t get the shot I’m
after, I might wait six months for the light to come
back to the spot from a different angle and try again.
Until I get that gut feeling that says, ‘That’s the one,’
I’m not going to settle for anything less.
 My optimal light is the strong, harsh kind that gives
rise to bold compositions like this.
Cambridge, 2020

‘The most remarkable moment on

the street is insignificant if the
lighting doesn’t do it justice.’
 I’m always on the hunt for a strong light source
that will make everything in the frame pop. This
doesn’t have to be the sun. Shooting at night, I look for
artificial light sources I can use, from shops,
streetlamps flashing adverts and neon signs to
moving vehicles such as police cars and ambulances.
The more temporary a light source, the better,
because that allows you to capture something that
will never be repeated. I like the colours in my images
to be really saturated and I’m conscious of how
different hues respond to one another. Most of all, I’m
drawn to primary colours. As much as the American
flag is a political symbol, I just love the combination of
red, white and blue. You see it in so many images by
the old masters of street photography. You can see
why it has become such a powerful icon.
In Cambridge, there used to be a hotel called The
University Arms. In 2015, some of the building was
demolished so that it could be redeveloped. I took
many pictures during the construction work, including
one of a man in a striped hoodie walking past some
striped hoarding (shown on cover). It was a pivotal
picture that helped bring me to the attention of a
bigger audience. With the new building complete,
each year in September at the right time of day, the
light comes straight through a certain window and hits
the concierge’s desk. I tend to hang around outside
the main doors, waiting for people to come in and out.
Whenever the doors open, you get this great
composition that’s defined by the shape of the
window with the light pouring through it. I was
shooting there in 2018, and someone opened the door
to the luggage store at the same time. Suddenly, a
bright-red suitcase in the store produced this
incredible, unpredictable flash of vibrant colour that
was very specific to that time and that day.
Red features a lot in my work, probably more than
any other colour. The old colour masters I admire most
likely shot on Kodachrome film and the reds, blues
and yellows in my work are all kind of skewed towards
the colour that that film produced. This, paired with
the fact that painting and illustration were my first
influences, means I find myself trying to recreate
those bold colours in clean compositions. That’s why I
seek strong light, which makes every shade look more
vibrant. I’m influenced as much by the colours I don’t
like as the ones that I do. I can’t stand the fluorescent
yellow of a high vis jacket. My yellows are always
tinged with mustard or more orange in tone. If that is
something I can fix in the edit, I absolutely will. My
reaction to colours is quite visceral. There have been
times when I’ve seen a potential picture but thought, ‘I
hate that colour,’ and I just won’t take it. I used to only
ever shoot in colour, but I’m being a little less strict
with myself these days. Now, if the light is right, I’m
happy to shoot in black and white for the sake of a
brilliant composition. Sometimes the only thing to do
is bend the rules.

‘The more temporary a light

source, the better, because that
allows you to capture something
that will never be repeated.’
Light changes so much throughout the day and
season. This shot was a real one-off.
Cambridge, 2018
 15/
Abstract the world
Learn to see the reflection before
you see what’s beyond it

T here comes a point when your eye is so attuned

to looking at the world photographically that you can’t
remember how it looked before. I realise this every
time I come across a window. Of course, the whole
purpose of a window is to allow light to enter a
building – and to let people see in and out. But to me
a window is a surface. When I look at that sheet of
glass, I see the reflections in it rather than the person
on the other side. This has given rise to awkward
situations. I’ll be pointing my camera right at some
beautiful interplay of colours on glass when I suddenly
see someone looking straight through with a slightly
surprised look on their face. This happens more often
than I’d like to admit. But in the main, my abstracted
way of looking serves me well.
 Pictures like this one combine figurative elements
– the eyes, the person – in an abstract way.
New York, 2022

My pictures are never purely abstract rather I use

elements of abstraction by photographing people
against the light to create silhouettes that mean
they’re more like shapes than characters, for example.
Faces interest me less than gestures, colours, lines,
form and texture. I love shooting through things like
reeded glass, for example, which gives an image a
kind of rippled, almost corrugated style. That takes
away the ‘story’ element and for me, makes it more
complicated and more interesting. It’s too simple just
to take a photograph of the thing right in front of you.
That’s what everyone else is doing. Make it harder for
yourself, add layers in there. It’s an extra challenge,
sure, but it’s also more fun.
Silhouettes are a constant in my work. I’m drawn to
shapes, rather than facial expressions.
ABOVE Cambridge, 2022
BELOW London, 2018
 I have a mental bank of objects to shoot through,
just like I have a mental bank of locations or light
situations around a city that I return to again and again.
I might see a window or glass doorway with warped
glass at an hour of day when there’s no one around.
Next time I’m walking down the same street, I’ll check,
and maybe stop, in case someone shows up on the
other side. I once took a picture through a really
scratched perspex panel in a bus stop. If it had been
all nicely refurbished, the photo wouldn’t have worked
because the scratches give it an atmosphere. You can
hardly see through it, so when there’s strong light
early in the day and early in the year, something
extraordinary happens. In my image, it’s misty almost,
with everything seeped in red and just the top of the
subject’s hair and her profile lit up. You can use your
camera settings to create abstracted effects, too,
working a slow shutter speed to blur action like here,
so the whole scene melts into colour and shape and
only a human silhouette anchors it in reality.

‘It’s too simple just to take a

photograph of the thing right in
front of you. That’s what everyone
else is doing.’
Bus windows on rainy days are classic for creating
smudgy, semi-abstract scenes, but as the old buses
get replaced, such images are harder to make
because new buses have windows that don’t steam
up. I have a few shots of condensation-covered café
windows where you can just make out a hand pushed
against them, but these are all disappearing too, with
refits and refurbishments. It’s one of those everyday
sights we might one day look back on as a relic from
another era, and that makes them all the more
interesting to document now. I’m also always looking
to fill a frame with repetition – patterns made by steps
or columns or a collection of people, for example. A
solitary person is rarely remarkable. But 10 or 20
people all dressed in the same colour clothing, like
the troupe of men in suits all in step, holding blue and
white striped umbrellas (see here) or a crowd of
people all coincidentally eating ice creams at the
same time, can make a great picture.
There’s also something about anonymity in
abstraction that makes an image universal in ways that
are harder to achieve otherwise. The people in any
given shot are what gives it a narrative. If it’s too
specific – say it’s based only on what a person
happens to be wearing, what they look like or their
face – it’s boring, but if there’s something happening
that could be applied to anyone, a really compelling
moment, emotionally, that’s interesting. Perceiving the
world in this way is a little like London cabbies doing
‘the Knowledge’ – the test in which they must learn
every main road, side street and alleyway in the UK
capital by heart. An exercise like that rewires your brain
in ways that can never really be reversed.

‘There’s something about

anonymity in abstraction that
makes an image universal in ways
that are harder to achieve
otherwise.’
By subtracting the specifics of an individual, you
open up an image to multiple interpretations.
London, 2017
 16/
Know your patch
Compile a mental library of
locations across your city that you
can return to time and again

T hink street photography, and you think of New

York, a city of towering skyscrapers, yellow taxis,
home to more than eight million people. You don’t
think of Cambridge – a historic town in England known
for its prestigious university and pretty buildings, with
a population of less than 150,000. There’s no wonder
the Big Apple is synonymous with the genre. It’s where
many of the greats cut their teeth, including the
photographers who have influenced me the most –
Saul Leiter and Ernst Haas. There is a whole set of
picture postcard images that come to mind when you
think of Cambridge – the backs of the colleges,
cyclists, students in gowns – and I’ve avoided it
consistently.
 Cambridge is a city steeped in history but that’s not
what you take away from my images.
Cambridge, 2017

I’ve never been a fan of the architecture and never

really paid attention to the things that make it unique,
like the porters who work at the colleges of the
university, but every now and then I might take a
picture of one of them and they are always popular on
social media. It makes sense because this is
something I see every day, but most people don’t ever
get to see it. Sometimes I think I need to stop rejecting
it simply because it’s not the aesthetic that I have in
my mind. But it feels too touristy. Anything too
obviously ‘nice’ just doesn’t draw me in. I think, ‘Well, if
anyone else had walked down this road at this precise
moment with a camera in their hand, that is exactly
the shot they would have taken. So, what’s the point?’
It would be different if I saw a composition that others
might come up with, but that featured an environment
that they don’t have access to, and so it doesn’t exist
already. Then, I might take the shot.
 I’ve been trying to capture a shot inspired by this
on the River Cam. It’s only a matter of time.
© Steve McCurry / Magnum Photos

‘Knowing your patch is about

understanding what is distinctive
 about the place where you live or
shoot.’
I’ll give you an example – a shot I’ve been trying to
get for some time. The scene reminds me of a 1999
image by Magnum photographer Steve McCurry
where you see a man from behind using a pole to
paddle a boat that is piled high with red, purple,
yellow and white flowers through Dal Lake, in India.
The context is different, of course, but there’s
something about it that sparks a similarity. The shot I
want to get shows a punter going under the
Mathematical Bridge in Queens’ College. Built in 1749,
the bridge is based on an ingenious design by James
King that uses gravity to keep all the elements in
suspension. Very Cambridge! There’s a building on the
right-hand side and the trees are full of leaves
because it’s summer, and the intersection between
those two things creates a perfect triangle in the water
– just like the McCurry image. And in the sky, there is
another big, bright V shape. These shapes are right at
the apex of the setting pole which is used to move the
punt along. You have to go there early in the morning
to get the right light, and at the weekend, otherwise
there’s no one out on the River Cam.
 Sometimes you need to travel, to expand your
horizons a little, to realise what makes the place you’re
from special. If you can’t do that for whatever reason,
you can still be exposed to all the different countries
and cities in the world through the internet. That is one
of the great advantages of social media – you can
easily see where everyone else is shooting street
photography and get some understanding of it from
that. Ultimately, it all comes down to the old idea of
showing people familiar things in a new way – or new
things in a familiar way. If you’re photographing
something no one’s ever seen before, you don’t need
to do something unheard of with the way you capture
it. Conversely, really creative portrait photography
works because it takes a face, something you spend
your entire life looking at, and reveals it to you it in a
way you’ve never seen before.
Knowing your patch is about understanding what
is distinctive about the place where you live or shoot,
and appreciating its own pros and cons for street
photography. It’s also about knowing the streets back
to front. This only comes from the hours you put in,
walking around, observing from every angle, at all
times of day and season. I remember, as a rollerblade-
mad kid, sitting in the car on journeys with my parents,
staring out of the window at the city as it passed, like it
was a movie. I’d see a rail and think, I need to
remember where that is, I want to come back and
skate that. I was constantly alert and it’s the same now,
only I’m looking for images.

I keep a mental bank of locations, scenes, objects

and light sources from the city around me. Mostly I’ll
hold on to these for a few days, but some I’ll keep for
longer. There was a spot in New York I kept in mind for
a year. On my first visit, I passed a certain wall at the
wrong time of day and didn’t have a chance to revisit it
at precisely the right time for another year. It was
clichéd and well known, but something I had to tick off
mentally. These things aren’t stored systematically in
spreadsheets and folders somewhere on my laptop –
they’re in my head or on my camera. Earlier, I talked
about the importance of taking lots of pictures. This is
a brilliant way to loosen up creatively, but it’s also a
way of making notes. I might never look at these ‘test
shots’ properly again, but the act of lifting up my
camera and recording a particular location as a
potential composition helps cement it in my memory.
 Much of what is held in the ‘bank’ is temporary
because the city is always on the move, always
changing. I tend to spot something and think, ‘That’s
quite a nice frame, I’ll come back to that tomorrow or
next week, try that one again. In January 2019, I
spotted how the midday winter light strikes the steps
of the Ivy in Cambridge and, after several visits, I got
this shot of someone entering the restaurant in red
high-heeled shoes. But generally, I don’t hold on to
things for too long. There have only been a few
occasions where I’ve really obsessed about one thing
and had to keep going back until I got a shot. The punt
is like that for me now. I’ll get there in the end.
I have a mental library of spots I’d like to photograph – in ways that
avoid the obvious.
ABOVE New York, 2019
BELOW Cambridge, 2019
 17/
Be a sharp critic
Create a distance from your
images so you can be objective
when selecting them

I don’t hold back when it comes to taking pictures. At

the end of a week away shooting in a foreign city, I can
easily have accumulated 10,000 images, including
test shots, although on a lunchtime wander around
Cambridge, I might just take a handful. Say I come
back with 50 shots from a day out shooting; they will
likely be focused on two or three things I thought were
interesting. As I look back at them, I might decide one
of them actually wasn’t all that good and then some
might be missing an extra element I wanted to
capture. So, I might only import eight photos – the
ones that I look back at and think about editing.
 Wait before you edit. This will give you the
breathing space to see what’s really worth keeping.
Cambridge, 2017

Where possible, I always leave time between

shooting and editing, the longer the better. It helps me
to be less emotionally invested. When I’m going
through my images, I’ll usually have one of the frames
open as I’m editing it, but I’ll simultaneously be
scrolling through the other, often almost identical,
versions. If I really can’t decide between them, I’ll just
stare at the smaller ‘navigator’ version. Because
composition is such an important aspect of my
photography, if an image doesn’t grab my attention
when it’s tiny, for me that means it’s too busy.
Normally, with a choice between four or five frames, I’ll
have a good idea as to which one of them is going to
be stronger. When I’m choosing between two, a quick
back and forth will do it.
 To make the cut, an image needs to be like this,
bold enough to grab me even as a thumbnail.
Cambridge, 2017

I don’t tend to share my work until I’ve made my

own selection. If I’m shooting with someone, and we’re
capturing the same thing but from different angles,
there’s a good chance we’d compare what we’d got on
the back of our cameras. And then you get a good
idea of whose shot is better. If they get the best
version of that shot, I’ll move on to something else.
More generally, I make a point of looking at other
street photographers’ work as much as possible.
Some people avoid that because it makes them feel
bad and worry that they’ll never compete, but I find it
motivating. I’ll get annoyed if I feel my work isn’t as
good and push myself to their level.

‘Some small element might jump

out that passed you by initially
because your concentration was
elsewhere.’
I rely heavily on my phone to find original files. I
have everything accessible there. You learn as much,
if not more, from the images you dismiss. Once you
mess up a shot, you won’t make the same mistake
again. You discover things by looking back through
your work. Some small element might jump out that
passed you by initially because your concentration
was elsewhere. That’s why it’s always good to hang on
to anything you even have an inkling might have some
potential.
 The only time I’ll import and keep every frame is
after a big trip like New York, even when I’ve done
bursts of the same composition. It can be small
differences that make one image stronger than
another. There might be something behind the subject
that doesn’t line up quite right. Or, in the case of a
silhouette, it might be that the person’s head is turning
very slightly so they’re more directly in profile;
frequently with a silhouette, it’s that split second when
the chin separates from the shoulder. There are
sometimes trade-offs, but you have to make a
decision and stick with it.
Your photographic style is as much about your selections in the edit
as how you shoot.
Cambridge, 2018.

Rejected images are often interesting to others, as

they give an insight into your creative process – just
like a contact sheet in the days of analogue
photography. You can find clever ways to share them
with your audience. If you’ve got three or four shots of
the same thing and they’re all great, stick them in a
carousel post on Instagram. People get to see the
variations going on when you’re shooting. I’ve shown
the ‘before’ and ‘after’ shots of the floating hat where
you can still see the whole man’s torso and the kids on
the swing at Tate Modern running through the frame
(see here and here). It’s a nice tool to be able to talk
about what works and what doesn’t and how I make
choices. It can help others to develop their own street
photography.
My followers love to see out-takes like this shot of
the Tate Modern swing discussed on this page.
London, 2017
 18/
Let your images shine
Go easy on the post-production –
subtle tweaks, made incisively, will
bring out the best in your work

A merican photographer Arnold Newman was

renowned for his portraits of musicians and artists and
there is a picture of his that has always stayed with
me. The success of this image isn’t so much about
what is included as what is subtracted. It’s a portrait of
Russian composer and pianist, Igor Stravinsky, with his
grand piano. Stravinksy is in the bottom left corner of
the frame, head in hand, almost wedged in, while this
magnificent great hulking musical instrument takes up
almost all the rest of the frame. It’s an unconventional
composition. You’d assume, with a portrait, that the
person would be the most prominent element. But it
says something about the intensity of the musician’s
relationship with his instrument.
An example I always return to as evidence that cropping is a
powerful compositional tool.
© Arnold Newman / Getty Images
 I’ll heighten the hue of colours like the red here,
making sure that they still look realistic.
New York, 2018

I’ve seen the original version of this image – a

wider shot covered in pencil-drawn crop marks, with
the the piano legs in shot. The crop is such a brilliant
piece of graphic design, sparse to the point of
perfection, taking away all possible elements until
what you are left with is total, minimalist clarity. I didn’t
look at the first version and think, ‘Oh, he cropped it,
that means it’s not so good.’ I thought, ‘I’m so glad he
cropped it.’ The result comes first. I follow this ethos
when it comes to working with my own images. There
are purists out there, street photographers who don’t
want to edit or crop at all. And I agree to an extent –
it’s great to try and get it right in-camera as much as
you conceivably can. Don’t just walk around with a
wide-angle lens and crop out compositions from that
all the time. But I also want my images to look their
best, and if I can make them slightly cleaner by
cropping, I will.

‘The main rule that street

photographers agree on when it
comes to editing is to stay true to
the candid element.’
In my Tate Modern image with the kids on the
swing (see here) there was a black backpack that I
excluded with a crop. There was just no need for it to
be there. This is a grey area, but I guess the main rule
that street photographers agree on when it comes to
editing is to stay true to the candid element. Cropping
something out is one thing, but actually removing an
element from within the frame would be a no-no.
Then the image is no longer an accurate
representation of something you saw at the time.
However heavily you process your images – and
some street photographers do go in for making
everything look like a shot from Blade Runner – you
haven’t staged the image. That’s the big difference. In
my shot of the gent in London who is holding a phone
and the facemask hanging off his hand (see here),
there’s a thread of cotton on the back of his jacket. It
drives me crazy. I hate it. But I can’t remove it. It has to
be there. That said, if there is a blemish, and I’m not
sure whether it was caused by dust on my sensor or is
actually in the shot, it wouldn’t bother me to remove it.
I might spend a few minutes at most in post-
production, subtly working the colour of each shot. In
the early days, I was a little more restrained with
colour, but now really punchy colour that still looks
natural has become my trademark. When I’m editing,
it’s important that skin tones still look authentic and
that highlights are not too cyan, because that can
become obvious. Take this image of a rose on a blue
table. I adjusted the yellow to make a more mustard
shade because I didn’t like the original yellow. In cases
like this, you have more freedom to control the colour
because no one knows the exact tone of the yellow to
begin with. It can be very different when dealing with
something well known, such as the shade of red on a
can of Coke. Be just as conscious of such elements as
you would be with skin tones.
I like warmth; you’ll never see that sci-fi look in my
images. I also tend to desaturate if there’s a blue cast
on a white shirt in my shots because I just don’t like
the look of those blue highlights. Brush up on the
basic physics of light, the way colour saturation falls
off into shadow – I did this by watching a Photoshop
video tutorial years back – and ensure whatever you
do to your images is realistic. There’s a point where
everything can start to look fake. Pull back before you
reach it. Keep in mind that images also look brighter
on screen compared to print and make sure to embed
colour profiles in your images if you’re using a good
print service. I tend to look at an image on my phone
with the brightness down before I post anything,
because most people are going to have their phone
screens set around that kind of ballpark and I’m
always conscious of how the majority of people will
see the image. Then I might make some more minor
adjustments before sharing to Instagram.
With editing, I have become more open to
experimentation. Street photography is something I
fell into by circumstance, almost arbitrarily. When I
started taking pictures, I decided that was the space I
wanted to inhabit because it was most accessible to
me at that stage, and some rules have come along
because of that. There is a fuzzy border regarding
what is an acceptable level of post-processing. There
are those who use a really surreal, clearly altered
colour palette and are still considered street
photographers. For me, that’s too far. But at the same
time, it’s something I’m always internally wrestling with
as I consider whether I always want to be a street
photographer or would I rather just be a
photographer?
Remember smartphone screens enhance
brightness when processing vivid images like this.
Barcelona, 2019
 19/
Pop the Insta bubble
Nothing beats social for some
things – but don’t get caught up in
it

W ithout Instagram, my street photography story

would have been very different. I never would have
connected with people like Ted Forbes and Kai Wong
or appeared on Wong’s YouTube channel. I never
would have had Skillshare classes, I never would have
been able to self-publish a book, entitled New York, of
my work in the city. None of those things would have
been possible. There is a balance to be struck. Social
media can create a network that supports you,
inspires you and presents you with new opportunities.
It can expose your work to audiences of hundreds of
thousands of followers, giving you a profile that will
take you places. But success on Instagram also brings
certain expectations, pressures and limitations.
Don’t let social media success stop you evolving
creatively. Otherwise, what’s the point?
London, 2019
More subtle images like these aren’t always an instant hit, so they
won’t be seen as widely.
ABOVE New York, 2019
BELOW Scotland, 2022
 I joined Instagram in 2016 and I feel like I arrived
late. There was a whole bunch of accounts that were
way bigger than mine when I was starting to push my
work out. But I’m very grateful that I got to it when I
did, because I have no idea how you’d grow an
account successfully now. When everything you
posted simply appeared chronologically, it was a
motivator. You had to put new images out every day
and if they were good, they would get traction. Back
then, if you posted at a particular time, you knew that
was when people would see your image. Now, you
have no idea.
 The reason for this is the ever-changing Instagram
algorithm – the set of rules that determines when and
how your content will be seen. At the time of writing,
photographers have noticed the algorithm prioritises
reels and videos over stills. I don’t want to be forced to
create content in a different way. I don’t want to
suddenly become a videographer. As cool as some of
that type of work is, that’s not what I do. So, instead, it’s
about finding ways to reformat the material I’ve
already got. You can have a lot of success putting still
images into reels and playing around with that or
creating a 15-second video of a still image. In your
feed, it looks no different.
When you do post a single, still image, it will
initially get shown to a small number of your followers
and if it doesn’t get a positive response straight away,
it won’t be shared further, so hardly anyone gets to
see it. That means that images that are more subtle or
niche won’t get a fair chance to be seen compared to
more obvious crowd-pleaser. This 100 per cent affects
the type of images that people shoot and share. How
could it not? And that, in turn, creates a kind of echo
chamber where everyone is photographing in a similar
way. Pandering to the algorithm is a hard habit to
break. One impact of this is that we all shoot in portrait
orientation because social media favours that, even
though some of the best early street photographers
shot amazing landscape images. As you realise what’s
successful, you shoot more of that and the images
that the algorithm shows you reflect and reinforce
that, especially if you’ve got a bigger account. So, it
just goes round and round.

‘Social media can create a network

that supports you, inspires you
and presents you with new
opportunities.’
Often, the images that have the biggest draw on
social media aren’t the ones I like best, but I share
them because I think they’ll go down well. There’s one
I shot in Regent Street, London, with some buildings
reflected in it and a silhouette in the bottom left. I was
doing a tutorial with someone, demonstrating how I
would compose a scene by lining up some steps with
a window ledge. There’s nothing wrong with it, but it
just seems so obvious to me. It’s always been really
popular on social media, but if you made me pick out
my 20 best photos, it’s not going to be in there. It’s
important for me to step outside the social media
bubble and remind myself that I have the freedom to
post something weird that I really like. In a way, that’s
an unforeseen advantage of the algorithm being less
predictable because it is always being fine-tuned and
isn’t simply based on the time of posting, so growth is
trickier to control – it’s kind of liberating. Some people
are just ignoring the algorithm altogether now. It’s also
worth remembering that an image that works well on
Instagram isn’t always going to be one that works well
in print. A scene that is bigger, with greater complexity
can get lost on the pocket-sized screen of a
smartphone, for example. There are shots that I hold
back, knowing they won’t have that instant impact, but
would look really good in a book or on a gallery wall.
Quite often, the photographers whose work I
respect most – the people who are doing
commissions and editorial for brands that I like – don’t
necessarily do that well on social media, even though
their images are incredible. It takes a lot longer to find
them but when I do, I’m just hooked. And I’ll seek such
work out. I won’t wait expectantly for the algorithm to
serve it up in my feed, I’ll go in and check a
photographer’s account regularly. And the more
‘weird’ pictures that I’ve been taking lately have led to
bigger jobs and bigger deals than I ever had when I
was pandering to the algorithm. The only time I’ll play
the game now is if I’m making sponsored content,
which is more likely to be formatted as a reel anyway.
If having a bigger account brings pressure, it also has
the benefit of not having to worry about trying to build
it through each individual image to bring in new
followers. I can just do whatever I want.
Some shots I take knowing they will be crowd-
pleasers on social. It’s about finding a balance.
London, 2017
 20/
Stay curious
Keep your eyes open – inspiration
is everywhere

E very street photographer goes on a journey. I

started mine in a completely different place to where I
am now. I thought I knew what street photography was
– fast-paced and in-your-face, but that wasn’t really
me. When I discovered the painterly style of Saul
Leiter and Ernst Haas, it felt like a homecoming. Leiter
once famously said, ‘A window covered with raindrops
interests me more than a photograph of a famous
person.’ I couldn’t agree more.
 My inspiration will always be the painterly street
photographers of New York. I just love colour.
New York, 2022

As my work has developed, colour is one of the

things I’ve become best known for and that has
shaped the way I see and shoot. Having a consistent
visual style is what gives your photography an
authorial stamp and keeps people coming back for
more. It’s also restricted me, in some ways. More
recently, I have discovered photographers like Jack
Davison, whose work I absolutely love and who shoots
colour or monochrome, depending on what fits the
scene. I’ve always been an admirer of Sebastião
Salgado, who works exclusively in black and white, as
well as Arnold Newman and Ralph Gibson, who
produced sleek, graphical compositions. I’ve started to
wonder, ‘Why am I so fixated on only shooting in
colour? Does it matter?’
The conundrum of social media is that when you
start to earn a reputation, there’s a fear of doing
something different. But you only have to look at the
great photographers of the past to see that this is
misplaced. Take Harry Gruyaert. He is a Magnum
photographer, noted for his colour documentary work
in India and North Africa, but he also shot fashion for
Hermès. The work is different from what he shot on
the street, but it’s still him and completely different
from what your average fashion photographer would
do. You can evolve, and as long as the change doesn’t
feel too abrupt, your followers will come along with
you. In the last few months, I’ve started throwing in
some more unorthodox shots that people might not
expect, like composite work or images based around
daily life like this picture of a New York workman,
which brings in light and texture to give it a different
mood to what you expect from street photos. I’ve also
shared images from my exploration of monochrome,
some of which are the opposite – figurative to the
point of portraiture – like this image of a man with one
eye concealed with a circular blast of light.
Colour photography is what I’m known for, but that
hasn’t stopped me exploring monochrome.
ABOVE New York, 2022
BELOW Cambridge, 2020
 Increasingly, I’m embracing a more experimental
approach. I’m giving myself greater freedom, even if
that means not sticking to the strict label of ‘street
photographer’. I’m just thinking of myself as a
‘photographer’. These days, I like to set myself new
challenges, like seeing what happens if I subject my
street images to a strange, warping effect in
Photoshop. I’m also exploring ways to do that in-
camera, using an acrylic mirror that I manipulate with
my hands and re-photographing an image I’ve taken
reflected from my laptop screen into that mirror. Trying
to do these things manually rather than in post-
production is just more interesting to me, and more
challenging and more confusing for people looking at
the final image.
In order to improve, you have to try new things and
expect to take some terrible photos. Switching up
lenses changes the way you look at everything. Using
a macro lens on the street would be very odd, for
example, but would force some creative usage that
might lead to something that really stands out.
Revisiting your archive can send you down unforeseen
paths. There might be a throwaway shot that suddenly
speaks to you. Maybe you notice some abstraction, a
reflection or colour that passed you by first time
around. Return to some of the places where you’ve
shot previously, but employ a new method or add an
extra layer of distortion and see how that changes
things. Keep adding more complexity to the process.
Get your hands on texture people aren’t used to
seeing – go to thrift stores and find old glass ashtrays
with bizarre shapes that distort things. Try shooting
through one of those.

‘Don’t play it safe, don’t be

constrained by genres, rules or
labels, but experiment as much as
 you can until you hit on something
you really love.’
Often, I try to reverse-engineer someone else’s
setup, and in that process I’ll stumble across another
way of doing things. Inspiration can come from
anywhere. I’m also always looking at influences from
outside of photography – at the work of illustrator,
David Foldvari, for example. I always heard that the
texture in his early images was created by
photocopying his drawings. Anyone who’s ever been
handed a test in school that includes a colour diagram
will be familiar with the degraded look of the image.
There’s no reason why you can’t replicate that digitally.
Take a screenshot, then upload it and screenshot that.
Upload it again, and so on, or make a print of your
work and see how photocopying a colour image in
black and white alters it.
Keep pushing yourself to try out things. This image
isn’t anything like you’d expect from me.
Cambridge, 2022
Street photography is a label – it’s up to you to
define it, instead of letting it define you.
ABOVE Cambridge, 2022
BELOW Cambridge, 2017
 Compared to some people, I’ve been a
photographer for a long time, but in some ways I’m
just getting started. I’m grateful for the success and
the opportunities I’ve had so far, but I don’t want just to
stick to what I’ve done already. And nor should you.
So, don’t play it safe, don’t be constrained by genres,
rules or labels, but experiment as much as you can
until you hit on something you really love – whether
that’s on the streets or somewhere else. If, like me, you
are someone who is more driven by visual aesthetic
than random human interaction, there is no limit to
where your own street photography journey will take
you – enjoy the ride. This might be an odd thing to
read at the end of a book about street photography,
but you don’t have to be a street photographer. Just
be weird. Figure out how to do the things the people
you admire do. And then do something they never
would have thought of.
Index
Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations
A
abstraction 104, 105–9, 138
adverts 57–8, 59, 81
anonymity, in abstraction 108
aperture priority 26
The Art of Photography 18
awkwardness 47–9, 105

balance 71
‘balloon head’ shots 80, 82, 85
‘blank canvas’ feeling 35, 37
body language 49–50
bus stops 92, 93–4, 107
bus windows 9, 49, 71, 80, 81, 108
Buscató, Pau 94

Cambridge 77, 93, 110, 111–13

cameras 23–7
candid photography 9, 69, 125
colour 13, 135–7, 138
block-colour backgrounds 42
and light 100
post-production tweaks 124, 125–6
 primary colours 99–100
saturation 126
working with colour 79
composition 27, 69–75, 119
rules of 69–71, 72, 75
sub-framing 72, 85–9
unconventional 123
condensation 14, 80, 81, 97, 108, 116
confidence 47–53
confusion, causing 91–5
connections 32, 33
contradictions 76
contrast 77–83
criticism 117–21
crops 125
crowd-pleasers 131–2, 133
crowds 43
curiosity 78, 135–41

Davison, Jack 18, 135

Delhi 29
distortion 94, 138
distractions
faces as 31
obscuring 72
doors and doorways 40, 84, 85, 87
drama 25–6, 54, 55

E
emotional investment 117
evening light 99
events 31
evolution 137
experimentation 126, 138, 141

faces 29, 31
figurative elements 104
‘fishers’ 15–17
‘floating hat’ image 94, 95, 120
focal length 26
Foldvari, David 138
Forbes, Ted 18, 129
framing 24
breaking a frame into segments 70
sub-framing 72, 85–9, 86, 88, 89

Gehry, Frank 35
Gibson, Ralph 135
Gilden, Bruce 11, 15, 26
groundwork 41–5
Gruyaert, Harry 137

H&M 90, 93
Haas, Ernst 18, 111, 135
use of light 12, 97, 99
hands 29, 31
Hermès 137
highlights 125–6
‘hunters’ 15–17, 25
I

inspiration 135–41
Instagram 32, 120, 126, 129–33
intrigue 40, 78
creating 71
juxtaposition and 79
Ivy 114, 115

juxtaposition 76, 77–83, 94

witty juxtaposition 80, 81, 82, 83

King, James 113

kit 22, 23–7
Klein, William 18

lampposts 85
Leach, Thomas 18
leading lines 71, 72
Leiter, Saul 135
Harper’s Bazaar 18
No Great Hurry: 13 Lessons with Saul Leiter 18
use of light 12, 97, 111
lenses 23, 25–6
 long lenses 12, 25, 72
macro lenses 138
switching up 138
wide angle lenses 11–12, 15, 25–6, 88, 125
Leslie, Stephen 66
light
being led by the light 97–103
and colour 100
framing with 85
harsh light 98
natural spotlights 96, 101
and shadow 75, 79
Lion Yard Shopping Centre 94, 95
locations, knowing your 111–15
London 29
Tate Modern 72, 73, 120, 121, 125
Trafalgar Square 86, 87

McCurry, Steve 112, 113

Magnum 113, 137
Maier, Vivian 77
Mathematical Bridge, Queens’ College, Cambridge 113
Meyerowitz, Joel 15, 17, 25
Fallen Man 55
monochrome 79, 135, 137
morning light 99
motion blur 32, 45, 107
mystery, creating 46
N

networks 129
New York 29, 31–2, 45, 93, 111
New York (Craig Whitehead) 129
Newman, Arnold 122, 123–5, 135
night, light sources 99

objectivity 117–21
objects, shooting through 107, 138
observation 41–5, 50
one-offs 55–61
originality 58
out-takes 117–20, 121
owning your shot 69–75

painterly style 134, 135

pairs, working in 43–5
patterns, repetition 108
people 71
awkwardness with photographing 47–9, 105
‘balloon head’ 80, 82, 85
as compositional elements 16, 17
creative portrait photography 114
details 28, 29–31
sub-framing 85–7
techniques for capturing 47–50
witty juxtaposition 80
perspective, mixing up 91–5
PhotoPills 31
Photoshop 138
Pinkhassov, Gueorgui 17
Pirelli HangarBicocca 87
placards 65, 81
portrait orientation 131
post-production 123–7, 138
prints 126
protests 65
purism 125
R

rain, shooting in the 63, 85

randomness 55–61
reflections and reflective surfaces 19, 90, 92, 93–4, 105, 138
Regent Street, London 132
rejected images 117–20, 121
repetition 79, 108
retro photographs 65
retrospect 63–7
rule of thirds 75
contrast and 80

Salgado, Sebastião 135

shadows 74, 99
and light 75, 79
shape-shifting cities 66, 67
shapes 106
 strong shapes 13
shutter speeds, slow 45, 107
silhouettes 38, 39, 106, 107, 118, 119
Skillshare 129
skin tones 125, 126
smartphones 23, 63–5, 126, 127, 132
social media 11, 113, 128, 129–33, 137
social tension 53
speed 32
steam 32, 33
Stravinsky, Igor 122, 123–5
street photography
definition 9–11
finding a style 15–21
Stuart, Matt 11
style 15–21, 120
sub-framing 72, 85–9

Tate Modern 72, 73, 120, 121, 125

test shots 37–8, 114, 117
texture 12, 32, 107, 137, 138
Trafalgar Square, London 86, 87

umbrellas 48, 49, 56, 57, 85, 86

The University Arms 99–100
urban change 43

V
visual cues 62, 63–7

warm-up exercises 35–8

windows 85, 105
bus windows 9, 49, 71, 80, 81, 108
Winogrand, Garry 37
witty juxtaposition 80, 81, 82, 83
Wong, Kai 23, 129
First published in 2023 by Frances Lincoln,
an imprint of The Quarto Group.
One Triptych Place, London, SE1 9SH
United Kingdom
T (0)20 7700 6700
www.Quarto.com

Text and photography © 2023 Craig Whitehead

© 2023 Quarto Publishing Group

Craig Whitehead has asserted his moral right to be identified as

the Author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright Designs
and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or

utilised in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopying, recording or by any information storage
and retrieval system, without permission in writing from Frances
Lincoln.

Every effort has been made to trace the copyright holders of

material quoted in this book. If application is made in writing to
the publisher, any omissions will be included in future editions.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British

Library.

ISBN 978-0-7112-8363-3
Ebook ISBN 978-0-7112-8364-0

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