With my photography I mostly focus on landscapes, along with some birding. But when given a chance to explore a larger city, I also very enjoy dabbling in some street photography. I mostly lean into a dramatic black and white approach when shooting the streets.

In the past I have done the street work with a big full frame camera, but for this most recent effort in downtown San Antonio I shot with a new camera- the Panasonic L10. It is a very compact camera with a fixed lens that ranges from 24mm to 75mm (Full frame equivalent).

My couple of shoots were both in the morning hours during the week, so the normal crowd levels were far more subdued than what one encounters on the weekends. As I walked the downtown streets I was looking for interesting scenes, and bold interplays of light and shadow. I shot the camera with a black and white profile called Leica Monochrome. The camera was recording 10 bit HEIF files with the black and white baked in, as well as capturing RAW files I could use if I preferred a color version of the scene.

I highly recommend shooting your camera with a Monochrom profle if you are trying to capture black and white images. It is quite helpful to have a preview of how the scene appears- the shapes and contrasting elements of shadow and light are much easier to identify and play with when there is a preview in the viewfinder- even if in post you choose to use the RAW file as your starting part for a black and white conversion. Just make sure to save BOTH JPEG and RAW so you are not stuck if you change your mind and prefer a color version of a shot.

I am enough of a control freak I basically never just use the files straight from camera. They are all tweaked in Lightroom, and then further adjusted in Nik Silver Efex 8 for refinements in how the black and white images are rendered.

There is a distinct advantage to shooting streets in a tourist city. People barely even notice when you are out shooting with your camera.

Biking the San Antonio Riverwalk near the Pearl.jpg

Chama Gaucha in downtown San Antonio.jpg

Crossing a downtown bridge in San Antonio- bw-3.jpg

Hemisfair Plaza water feature- downtown San Antonio.jpg

Some tips for shooting street images

Consider the fishing approach- this involves finding a compelling backdrop with great light, bold shapes and lines, etc. and then waiting for an interesting person to enter the scene. Give it five to ten minutes if possible. This has the added advantage of you simply becoming another part of the scene to passers by. You will appear interested in simply photographing the environment.
Make your camera settings as automatic as possible. Your focus needs to be on finding compelling frames. For me, this means shooting in Aperture priority mode with Auto-ISO enabled. Unless light is very low- this means setting Auto-ISO for a minimum shutter speed of 1/500 to freeze most action. You can also consider setting one of the custom dials on your camera to automatically use the exposure values you most commonly use on the street.
Don’t be afraid of blocked shadows. The goal is not a perfectly exposed photo as per the histogram. The goal is to play with the light and shadow in the scene to create interesting images.
Use this as a time to play with your photography- experiment with panning, Intentional Camera Movement, and slow shutter speeds to abstract the moving elements in your image and convey that sense of motion.

In addition to the black and white work- here are some of my favorite color images from my two street sessions.