Who is the subject in photography ?

Who is really the subject ?

That’s a question that might comes many times when you start street photography as opposed to landscape or portrait ones. In street photography the complexity is usually to not get lost with too many informations. Look at this picture for example… when I first saw how the girls where organising their food I thought mmmmh, very interesting… let’s ask them to take a picture of their food as well as it will look very cool #Brunch #foodporn etc…. and then I realised that they started to take pictures at the same time with 2 types of camera…. How cool is that !!

What a better picture could lead us to talk about the subject selection ??

For me it was obvious : I wanted to catch the unicity of this action and then quickly enough you have to think about the light … where is the light, where is the shadow, how could I isolate them from the rest of the scene. overall the light was quite soft and progressive and it was neither too risky nor a big asset for me.

Now what is the story I want to tell ?? I want viewer to understand that they create their favorite post for insta and of course cutest they want to show their cutest food menu ( look at the big sandwich excluded from their composition :) ). I also want the viewer to see the interesting contrast between one taking polaroid instant pictures and the other one taking the same shot with digital cam… like to extend their pleasure : one right now and the other one for the eternity, one for them as real friend and one for their social media friends….

Last but not least I will leave you with a question : what do you think is the subject for the one taking a picture on the left ?? Does she take a picture of food or doest she take a picture of her friend taking a picture of food ……

I think you got the point …. I created on purpose a complex discussion about choosing the subject because it is a very tricky thing that will for sure not be solved by putting your target in the middle of the picture.

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Tell me about your best way to choose and isolate you subject, any funny story where you totally missed it to learn together from it ?

Let’s Talk tech :

On this one I was using my favourite ( yet a bit expensive ,,,) zoom. Many people will tell you to go for prime and not zoom as they can offer bigger aperture for lower price, and that’s true, prime length with fix local Len are very good to start with and help you to move around your subject to find your composition. That said zoom is of course very comfortable and help you to do portrait and wide angle quite easily not changing anything. Yes sure… I’m getting lazy ;)