From the course: Street Photography: Candid Portraiture

Shooting in a busy, culturally significant part of the city

From the course: Street Photography: Candid Portraiture

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Shooting in a busy, culturally significant part of the city

(crowd chattering) [Voiceover]- Well, we continued our walk and we ended up near Ground Zero, actually, but when we got to the area that I started to photograph in, it was really just a sea of humanity. It was actually a lot of the people just sort of leaving their offices, heading for the subways, trying to get outta town. So with all that craziness going on, I thought, I saw a billboard that had an image of the Freedom Tower and the skyline, so I thought I would try a slow shutter speed and blur the humanity that was coming at me. There was not a lot else I could really do in that tight confine. Normally, that's the kinda thing where I would like to have a tripod, but I didn't. So what I often do is, when I'm forced to use slow shutter speeds hand-held, it's nice if you have a image stabilization lens or a VR lens, but even failing that, I might do, at slow shutter speeds, a burst of frames, because in my experience, I end up seeing that the third frame in tends to be a little sharper. (camera shutter clicking) I also decided to pre-focus, and maybe put my camera against the wall and use that as an anchor, as kind of a tripod. And I dunno what we're gonna get but it was certainly worth a try. And otherwise, the light just suddenly came out, as it often does. It looks great now, I hope it looks good on me. I think we gotta take advantage of it and maybe just go inside a little bit deeper and see what we can find in this nice light. It's not gonna last much longer, so I'm gonna head out. (camera shutter clicking)

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