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Bridging Tech and Creative Photography
Bridging Tech and Creative Photography
Bridging Tech and Creative Photography
Education Field Instructional

How Becoming Blinder Taught Me to Shoot Street Photography Faster

Chris Gampat
No Comments
10/07/2014
4 Mins read

Last Updated on 10/07/2014 by Julius Motal

Chris Gampat The Phoblographer Canon G1X review images (21 of 28)ISO 3201-320 sec at f - 2.0

“Slow down!” said a videographer to me one day when I was shooting a video for Cosyspeed in Berlin about my street photography.

“What? Why?” I retorted.

“You’re moving too fast!”

And that’s when I realized that I’ve finally learned how to shoot street photography very, very fast. There’s a major problem though: I’m going blind. My left eye is legally blind and barely usable even with my glasses and my right eye does most of the work. With that said, I needed to train myself to capture images without even looking sometimes. But it’s tough to do and requires you to have a completely clear mind, lock onto moving subjects with your eyes, feel emotions and moments, and use zone focusing methods in addition to Sunny 16 methods. When combined together, I learned how to shoot street photography faster.

Zone Focusing

Chris Gampat The Phoblographer Ilford Delta 400 scans image samples review (6 of 13)

The first method that you should do is learn to zone focus. Zone focusing is when you use your lens’s aperture and the depth of field scale together to get a better sense of what will be in focus at a certain distance. There is a great explanation of it here on our site. This is best done with a fully manual focusing lens or a lens that is 50mm or wider. Modern autofocus lenses don’t have effective and working depth of field scales with the exceptions of some from Fujifilm and Olympus.

When you start to zone focus, you start to look specifically at certain areas and distances from you. As you walk around, that distance moves with you as if ti’s a specific person that you’re following and that needs to stay at a parallel distance away from you. If something steps into that area, then it will be focus.

Zone focusing helped me to get more images in focus and accurate because it didn’t always require me to fiddle with a viewfinder, focusing to a distance, and then clicking the shutter. Instead, it was all instinctive and all that I had to do was react. Many other zone focusing shootings also feed the same way.

Sunny 16

Chris-Gampat-The-Phoblographer-Zeiss-21mm-f2.8-Canon-EF-mount-review-images-street-and-landscape-22-of-29ISO-1600

The Sunny 16 rule is one that photographers have been following for years and years. Basically, it states that at f16 in bright sunlight, your shutter speed will be the reciprocal of your ISO. That means that in bright sunlight, I would be shooting at f16, ISO 100 and 1/100th. As you move from one area to another, the lighting is bound to change due to shadows from buildings and clouds. As this changes, you should keep in mind how the light shifts and adjust your shutter speed accordingly. Here’s another explanation of what we mean. If you’re shooting digital, there is no reason why you can’t shoot at ISO 1600 during the day time to ensure that you get an image with a fast enough shutter speed.

The reason why this worked so well for me is because even though I couldn’t always see everything out of my left eye, I could surely tell the quality of the light. So this helps me to get a fast enough shutter speed and a narrow enough aperture when combining it with the zone focusing method. Together, they help me get the images I want.

Clarity of Mind

Chris-Gampat-The-Phoblographer-Leica-M9-at-Bryant-Park-18-of

In order to go out and shoot, you need to clear your mind of whatever may be bothering you at that time. In fact, walking around and shooting is a great way to get something off of your mind like a rough time that you may be going through. When you have a clear mind, then you can focus on just shooting. And as someone getting even more blind, focusing on the task at hand helps me to capture moments as they happen.

Street photography also takes sometime to learn how to read body language, predict, and react how things will pan out. Then all you need to do is make sure you’re in the right place before you shoot.

Paying Attention to the Environment

Chris Gampat The Phoblographer Sony A7s review images street photography (7 of 8)ISO 16001-400 sec at f - 5.6

Shooting street images requires you to pay lots of attention to your surroundings. For starters, you could accidentally step into traffic and get hurt. That isn’t good for anyone. But you’ll also need to generally look around and find interesting subjects or things to shoot. When you do this then all you need to do is keep in mind the zone focusing rules and shoot.

Paying attention makes you learn how to predict someone’s movements or reactions and it helps you to read body language. To that end, you learn to read emotions and figure out whether or not something is worth shooting or just moving on.

Shooting Blind

Chris Gampat The Phoblographer Samsung 16-50mm lens review images (13 of 17)ISO 4001-500 sec at f - 2.0

So how does a photographer that is going blind shoot images in focus without the aid of autofocus? Part of it comes from seeing the world the way that the camera does and vice versa. My vision naturally makes me view the world in a 35mm field of view–not in 50mm. So when a scene comes about, the only thing that needs to be done is raising the camera and pressing the shutter after figuring out if the scene will be in focus or not. Many times I also shoot from the hip just because of the fact that the world looks so much different from down there.

Lastly, because I know that I can’t totally rely on my sense of sight, I learn to react and use whatever sight I do have to ensure that I get the shot.

When zone focusing is combined with using the Sunny 16 rule, then the technical aspects are achieved. But by seeing the world in the focal length, you’ll have an easier time capturing a scene. As far as subjects and characters go, you’ll need to just pay attention and see the world in a way that your camera can. After that, it’s about thinking and reacting.

shoot Shoot Street Photography Faster sunny 16 viewfinder vision zone focusing
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Chris Gampat

Chris Gampat is the Editor in Chief, Founder, and Publisher of the Phoblographer. He provides oversight to all of the daily tasks, including editorial, administrative, and advertising work. Chris's editorial work includes not only editing and scheduling articles but also writing them himself. He's the author of various product guides, educational pieces, product reviews, and interviews with photographers. He's fascinated by how photographers create, considering the fact that he's legally blind./ HIGHLIGHTS: Chris used to work in Men's lifestyle and tech. He's a veteran technology writer, editor, and reviewer with more than 15 years experience. He's also a Photographer that has had his share of bylines and viral projects like "Secret Order of the Slice." PAST BYLINES: Gear Patrol, PC Mag, Geek.com, Digital Photo Pro, Resource Magazine, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Finance, IGN, PDN, and others. EXPERIENCE: Chris Gampat began working in tech and art journalism both in 2008. He started at PCMag, Magnum Photos, and Geek.com. He founded the Phoblographer in 2009 after working at places like PDN and Photography Bay. He left his day job as the Social Media Content Developer at B&H Photo in the early 2010s. Since then, he's evolved as a publisher using AI ethically, coming up with ethical ways to bring in affiliate income, and preaching the word of diversity in the photo industry. His background and work has spread to non-profits like American Photographic Arts where he's done work to get photographers various benefits. His skills are in SEO, app development, content planning, ethics management, photography, Wordpress, and other things. EDUCATION: Chris graduated Magna Cum Laude from Adelphi University with a degree in Communications in Journalism in 2009. Since then, he's learned and adapted to various things in the fields of social media, SEO, app development, e-commerce development, HTML, etc. FAVORITE SUBJECT TO PHOTOGRAPH: Chris enjoys creating conceptual work that makes people stare at his photos. But he doesn't get to do much of this because of the high demand of photography content. / BEST PHOTOGRAPHY TIP: Don't do it in post-production when you can do it in-camera.
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