Capture Dramatic B&W Street Photos with a Unique Minimalist Look (VIDEO)
Street photography is a popular genre that relies upon many of the same techniques that are so familiar for shooting landscapes, cityscapes, environmental portraiture and other outdoor imagery. It’s also an accessible fallback when you can’t travel far from home because most of us have a nearby city or town where numerous photo opportunities abound.
This nine-minute episode from British photographer Roni Sidhu demonstrates five easy techniques for capturing the essence of urban life with dramatic b&w street photos that convey an engaging minimalist look. You’ll discover how simplicity and contrast will transform everyday scenes into powerful visual stories that jump off the screen.
This compelling style celebrates the impact of simplicity and very deliberate composition, and Sidhu explains the technique like this: “To create minimalist photography we want to use just a few elements, uncluttered backgrounds, and negative space to create powerful images” of scenes that are typically crowded with passing cars and bustling pedestrians, bright signs, and other distractions that fill the frame with clutter.
Sidhu’s five tips are designed to help you create order out of chaos, with images that are not only different than most but very difficult to ignore. Along the way you’ll learn the optimum camera settings required, the best gear to use, and framing techniques that diverge from those you employ for other styles of photography. Sidhu’s superb imagery also provides a heavy dose of inspiration.
The overarching concept can be described in three words: less is more, and Sidhu begins by demonstrating how to accomplish this goal by choosing a simple background and then doing this: “Adjust your camera settings and wait for the right thing to happen.” That’s why patience and anticipation are critically important.
Another key consideration involves understanding how highlights and shadows contribute to effective high-contrast images, and Sidhu’s examples include captions with the exposure settings used to make the shots.
Sidhu also explains the value of thoughtful preparation: “Having a rough idea of what you want to capture before it actually happens will ensure you’re ready to go at a moment’s notice to capture a great photo opportunity when it occurs.”
The foregoing is just a small taste of the techniques and tools you’ll learn in this lesson, and we guarantee that your street photography skills will grow by leaps and bounds when you follow Sidhu’s straightforward suggestions. Then head over to his instructional YouTube channel for more great advice.
And for those of you who prefer shooting in color, we recommend the earlier primer we posted, demonstrating how to transform dull daylight scenes into photographs with a spectacular Golden-Hour effect.
