James Nachtwey: The 60 Minutes Interview – CBS News

When Russia invaded Ukraine last year James Nachtwey packed up his cameras and Kevlar vest and rushed to the frontlines. Nachtwey is one of the greatest war photographers of all time. Over the last four decades he’s covered nearly every armed conflict in the world. He was shot in the leg in Thailand, wounded by a bomb in El Salvador, a mortar in Beirut, and a grenade in Iraq that was tossed into a humvee he was riding in.

James Nachtwey is 75 now, and as we found out trying to keep up with him over the past year, still risking his life to capture images that may be difficult to look at… but important to never forget. 

In the darkest times and in the most dangerous places, James Nachtwey captures beauty and brutality. Moments of hate and heroism, senseless destruction, and quiet acts of compassion. 

His photographs reveal the deepest and often disturbing depths of who we are and what we do to each other. 

Anderson Cooper: You’ve said that photographs can speak, and I’m wondering if you feel like you’re– you’re helping give voice to some of the people you photograph.

James Nachtwey: Well, many of the people I photographed are marginalized by the powers that be, that they’re silenced, they’re made invisible. So when someone comes from another part of the world and he assumes risk to tell their story, I think people see us as a kind of messenger. 

Nachtwey has devoted his life to telling other people’s stories… bearing witness to their suffering and sacrifices. But documenting what he calls “the insanity of war” has been the core of his career. 

He’s spent decades covering conflicts in Afghanistan and the Middle East, the war in Bosnia, and the genocide in Rwanda when as many as a million people died. 

Anderson Cooper: Some photographers have talked about their camera as a weapon. Do you think of your camera in that way?

James Nachtwey: I think it’s a way of looking at it. Because in a way you’re, you might be fighting for peace or fighting against an injustice and the way you do it is by informing people about it, with the faith that people will want something done about it. 

In Ukraine at the start of the war Nachtwey worked in and around Kyiv and Kharkiv for the New Yorker magazine. These are images he took in Bucha shortly after Russian troops pulled out, leaving behind the bodies of civilians they’d executed. 

James Nachtwey: Bucha was horrendous. It was really, like, kind of butchery. 

Anderson Cooper: In terms of brutality, of all the militaries you have seen does the Russian military stand apart in Ukraine for their behavior?

James Nachtwey: Somehow the Russians have stood apart, and not only in Ukraine, but in Chechnya. 

Nachtwey was in Chechnya’s capital Grozny for weeks in 1995 and ’96, as Russian forces relentlessly bombarded the city… 

James Nachtwey: The part that was inhabited by the Chechens was pounded into rubble from artillery, and rocket fire, and air strikes for weeks and weeks on end, with the civilian population trapped inside. They’ve taken that to Ukraine but it’s throughout the country.

In Kharkiv in eastern Ukraine… last year we watched Nachtwey as he worked.. photographing a man living in a crawl space under a building to avoid shelling. 

Months later, back in his New Hampshire studio, Nachtwey showed us some of the images he’d taken.

Anderson Cooper: What made this an image that spoke to you?

James Nachtwey: The expression on his face. If you really look carefully at his eyes, you can see there’s terror in his eyes. He’d just been living in a state of terror for quite a while. 

This photograph was taken in a Kyiv suburb of civilians evacuating across a makeshift bridge. 

Anderson Cooper: These are split seconds that are occurring. You can be running and taking a picture…

James Nachtwey: Quite often I’m running. And I have to try and make a composition, get it in focus, and catch the moment. 

Anderson Cooper: People talk about your use of hands in images. Is that something you’re conscious of?

James Nachtwey: I’m extremely conscious of hands and eyes. I think those are the two most expressive parts of people. 

James Nachtwey: This is a really good example here.

James Nachtwey: That’s the center of the picture, the old man’s hand, reaching for support to be held up by the volunteer.

Anderson Cooper: How many scenes like this have you seen in your life? 

James Nachtwey: Too many. 

Decades of Nachtwey’s photographs are on display in a traveling exhibition called Memoria. When it stopped in New York he showed us some of the 67 stunning images in it. 

James Nachtwey: These are the orphanages in Romania. 

In 1990 Nachtwey helped reveal the shocking squalor and neglect in Romania’s state-run orphanages.

James Nachtwey: The cribs were just packed together. The children were in the cribs and they weren’t taken out to play. They were almost like in prison, in a way. 

His photographs, published in The New York Times Magazine, helped lead to an international effort to rescue these children. 

James Nachtwey: How does a child who’s, what, 3-years-old maybe have a look like that in his eyes? 

Other walls in the exhibition were lined with casualties of war…a family mourning in Bosnia… a father protecting his wounded daughter from gunfire in El Salvador.  

Anderson Cooper: Those are machete strikes? 

And this man — a survivor of a machete attack in Rwanda.

James Nachtwey: He couldn’t talk. I approached him very slowly. And I just made eye contact with him. And I showed him my camera. And he allowed me to take the picture. He even turned his face more toward the light without me asking. 

Anderson Cooper: That’s important to you, that somebody gives their permission in a situation like this? 

James Nachtwey: I don’t wanna feel like I’m taking from people. I want them to feel like they’re part of what I’m doing. And I think he understood what his scars would say to the rest of the world. 

Anderson Cooper: Do you get depressed by it? Do you cry? Do you get angry?

James Nachtwey: I’m angry a lot of the time. I mean, when I see innocent people being pushed around and bullied. Yeah, I fight depression. It– the things are depressing. But I think it’s a sense of purpose that, you know, sorta drives me through that.

Anderson Cooper: You’ve said that you had to learn how to channel your anger as a journalist. 

James Nachtwey: I realize anger can just throw you off the rails. So I channel it into the pictures. And I think my pictures have anger in them, but they also have compassion. 

It was this image and others taken by the legendary life magazine photographer Larry Burrows in Vietnam that opened Nachtwey’s eyes to the power of pictures when he was a student at Dartmouth College in the late 1960s. Burrows’ photographs had a point of view, revealing the reality of war for service members and civilians alike.

Anderson Cooper: How did you start? 

James Nachtwey: I just started cold. I read books. I would create assignments for myself and I would go out as if I was working for an editor and practice.

Anderson Cooper: Wait, so you would just make up your own assignments?

James Nachtwey: Yes. I said, “Okay, I’m gonna go out on that fishing trawler.” You know, making believe, you know, I was shooting for National Geographic or something. 

He landed a job taking pictures for the Albuquerque Journal in 1976. That’s his photo on the front page. 

But it wasn’t until 1981, after 10 years of training, that Nachtwey felt ready to photograph armed conflict. He bought a ticket to Belfast, northern Ireland where riots and street battles were escalating.

Anderson Cooper: Did you know people there? 

James Nachtwey: I didn’t know anyone. I was green. I just threw myself into it. 

His photographs from there were published by Newsweek magazine. 

James Nachtwey: I felt that I was in the midst of history as it was happening and I was documenting it and that– that was really an exciting feeling.

Anderson Cooper: You were on the breaking wave of history. 

James Nachtwey: I mean, isn’t that what photographers do?  Because nothing’s been written. A situation is happening, we actually don’t know what’s gonna happen in the next moment. Anything can happen. 

His unflinching coverage of the civil wars in Central America in the 1980’s cemented Nachtwey’s reputation and earned him a contract with Time magazine…where his work appeared for the next 34 years. 

In South Africa in the early 1990s Nachtwey covered the violent end of apartheid and the blood-soaked birth of a new democracy. He was there when another photojournalist Ken Oosterbroek was shot to death and two other colleagues wounded.

James Nachtwey: We were down on the ground, trying to not be targets of incoming fire.  And you can see my hair part from the bullet going through my hair.

Anderson Cooper: You actually felt the bullet go through your hair?

James Nachtwey: You can actually see it on the film. 

Here it is again in slow motion, as Nachtwey in the white shirt moved to reach his injured colleague, a bullet, like a gust of wind, grazed his hair. 

Anderson Cooper: You’ve come close many times to being killed.  Is it worth it for these images?

James Nachtwey: It’s not for any one image. It’s for the job itself. I decided a long time ago that if I was gonna do this, I would have to put myself at risk, and anything could happen. 

Anderson Cooper: You clearly made a commitment that this was worth sacrificing for, worth sacrificing having a family for. 

James Nachtwey: I realized that if I were to pursue what I’m doing, and I was very driven to do that, I wouldn’t be a good father. I wouldn’t be a good husband, and all that would fall apart. I just didn’t want that to happen. So I had to forgo it.

Nachtwey lives in Hanover, New Hampshire, where he went to college, though he is rarely there for long. 

His life’s work — nearly a million images–has been acquired by Dartmouth, including his wrenching coverage of the opioid epidemic in the U.S. and contact sheets from the morning of September 11th. Nachtwey was just blocks away when the towers were hit. 

Anderson Cooper: So that’s the first image…

James Nachtwey: Yes. That’s roll one. That’s the first picture right there.

The proof sheets are a silent reminder of the horror that day…but also reveal how Nachtwey works. He isn’t just a photographer documenting destruction. He’s a man in search of meaning. 

James Nachtwey: About a block and a half from the south tower was a small Roman Catholic church with a cross on the top. And I thought that was an interesting way of framing it. It somehow indicated the cultural difference between who was being attacked and who was doing the attacking. And as I was photographing it, the tower fell. 

Anderson Cooper: That’s what happening right here?

James Nachtwey:  It starts collapsing as I’m photographing it. And all of this debris, these giant girders that must have weighed tons, were flying through the air.

Anderson Cooper: You were about to get killed?

James Nachtwey: So I found my way into the lee of a building and it all flew over me. 

Decades of close calls have taken their toll on James Nachtwey. His hearing is damaged and he has grenade shrapnel in his knees, stomach, and face, but he has no plans on retiring and still finds reasons to hope in his camera’s viewfinder. 

James Nachtwey: That look of just utter joy and… 

As in this image of Nelson Mandela on the eve of his election as South Africa’s first Black president in 1994. 

James Nachtwey:  His fist in the air, which is a symbol of both triumph and defiance.

And this one, taken two years earlier of South African children playing on a trampoline. 

Anderson Cooper: What made you take this picture?

James Nachtwey: There’s something about the innocence of children that’s transcendent and to bounce on a trampoline, I think that you get to the height of your jump and then for a moment, you defy gravity. And I think that’s the feeling that I wanted to get in this picture, that they’re transcending the weight that has been on their society.

Perhaps in the end that is what James Nachtwey shows us in his work. That we are all capable of transcending our circumstances and ourselves. We can commit terrible acts of   brutality and barbarism, but also stunning acts of kindness and caring. 

Anderson Cooper: Are you optimistic about the human species? I mean, you see the worst in, in people. 

James Nachtwey: I don’t know if “optimism” is exactly the right word. But in these horrible situations, we see everyday citizens doing remarkable things for each other.  Mothers and fathers are my heroes. What they do for their children. How they protect them. Being in places where people have next to nothing and yet, anything they have, they offer to a stranger. Those are the things that we all have and that are displayed in the worst situations that makes me believe in humanity.

Produced by Denise Schrier Cetta. Associate producer, Katie Brennan. Broadcast associat, Annabelle Hanflig. Edited by Joe Schanzer.

Anderson Cooper

Anderson Cooper, anchor of CNN’s “Anderson Cooper 360,” has contributed to 60 Minutes since 2006. His exceptional reporting on big news events has earned Cooper a reputation as one of television’s pre-eminent newsmen.

Nfld. & Labrador·Video

It’s rare for survivors to be able to share their stories in full and in a way that’s meaningful for them, said organizer Ashley MacDonald, but this concept allowed for that.

Photo project challenged survivors to explore the concept of justice

Survivors of sexual violence reframe justice with photography

3 hours ago

Duration 7:14

The Visions of Justice photo journey exhibit is a series of images from survivors of sexual violence who were challenged to take a photo that captures what justice means to them. Meet some of the survivors and learn more about their process in the video above.

Visions of Justice: A photo journey challenged survivors of sexual violence to capture the complexities of justice in a photograph.

It’s rare for survivors to be able to share their stories in full and in a way that’s meaningful for them, said organizer Ashley MacDonald. But this concept allowed for that.

The Journey Project, a group that helps survivors of sexual violence navigate the legal system, held virtual workshops with local photographers that survivors from across Newfoundland and Labrador could participate in. 

They were encouraged to use photography to process trauma, reflect on what they’ve been through and create a new image of justice. 

For a second year, survivors could submit their piece with or without their name and choose whether or not to include words with their image.

Watch the video above to meet some of the survivors who took part and hear how Visions of Justice: A photo journey shaped them.

Read more from CBC Newfoundland and Labrador

In 2010, the Obamas hung a series of photographs of Lake Michigan by photographer Catherine Opie in the White House.

It marked a dramatic passage from the margins of society to the mainstream for Opie, who began her career documenting queer culture at the height of the AIDS epidemic in the 80s and 90s.

Her early work, inspired partly by photographer Robert Mapplethorpe’s examination of New York’s gay BDSM subculture in the 60s and 70s, mixed art and activism in spectacular fashion.

Warning: This article contains images depicting partial nudity and self-cutting that may be challenging for some readers.

A new exhibition at the Heide Museum of Modern Art, Catherine Opie: Binding Ties, presents some of these works in Opie’s first major survey in Australia.

More than 50 works from a career spanning four decades appear in the show, including examples of Opie’s Renaissance-inspired early portraiture and her more recent images of swampland and blurred landscapes.

Opie received her first camera, a Kodak Instamatic, for her ninth birthday, a gift from her parents.

At this young age, she was inspired by US photographer Lewis Hine, whose ground-breaking photographs of children working in mills, mines and factories helped end child labour in the US. She also counts the photojournalism of Life and Time magazines (copies of which were ever-present in her home, growing up) as a formative influence.

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“I wanted to visualise this world we live in and be curious and ask questions and try to make work that would … create a legacy of my own life and the time I was living in,” Opie tells Daniel Browning, host of ABC RN’s The Art Show.

Opie’s family moved from Ohio to California when she was 13, and she set up a darkroom in their new house in San Diego.

Her passion for photography continued throughout high school, and while she considered becoming a kindergarten teacher, she ultimately enrolled in art school.

Opie completed an MFA in 1988 and moved to Los Angeles, where she began photographing her friends in the leather-dyke community.

She initially feared the transgressive nature of her work, including her BDSM-inspired self-portraits, would jeopardise her academic career.

“At that point in my life, I felt life was short — watching friends in their 20s and 30s die [from AIDS] — and it seemed too important not to go ahead and make that work, even though I thought I was … locking myself out of academia,” she says.

Fortunately, Opie’s academic career flourished. “Twenty-five years at UCLA, and I’m now chair of the art department. It all worked out,” she says.

Opie’s diverse oeuvre includes photographs of depopulated landscapes, urban panoramas, Californian surfers, high school footballers, and even Elizabeth Taylor’s possessions, photographed immediately before the star’s death in 2011.

Despite the eclectic nature of her subjects, common threads run through Opie’s work: community, identity and humanity.

Self-Portrait/Cutting (1993)

Among Opie’s best-known — and best loved — works are her confronting self-portraits dating from the early 90s.

Self-Portrait/Cutting (1993) shows a bare-skinned Opie standing before a background of emerald cloth, facing away from the camera.

Etched into the skin of her back is a childlike drawing, oozing blood, of a house with a puff of smoke rising from the chimney, the sun appearing from behind a cloud, birds in the sky and, in the foreground, two stick figures wearing triangle dresses and holding hands.

Opie conceived the idea for the portrait after her first serious breakup, when she found herself beset with longing for a family that seemed out of reach – personally and politically – at that moment in time.

“I kept doodling that image over and over and over again, and finally I said: ‘I need to make a piece from this, and I want it to be a cutting,'” she says.

The following year Opie made Self-Portrait/Pervert (1994), in which she appears with a leather bondage hood over her head, with the word ‘pervert’ etched into her chest in cursive script and 23 hypodermic needles threaded through the skin of each arm.

The “challenging” (her word) image celebrated the leather community at a point when many LGBTQI+ activists were distancing themselves from radical queer subcultures in the push for social acceptability and marriage equality.

The portrait triggered an avalanche of interest in Opie’s personal life when it appeared at the 1995 Whitney Biennial – and necessitated a frank conversation with her parents.

But Opie remembers its creation as a joyous occasion.

“I did that image in San Francisco in a studio with 15 of my nearest and dearest … It was kind of a party,” Opie recalls.

Both Self-Portrait/Cutting and Self-Portrait/Pervert made strong political statements in an era of conservatism and homophobia.

“Instead of retreating and being closeted, I decided that visibility and representation were important,” Opie told UK magazine The Gentlewoman in 2022.

Melissa & Lake, Durham, North Carolina (1998)

In 1998, Opie bought an RV and embarked on a 14,500 kilometre road trip in search of the lesbian domesticity she longed for – and, indeed, had carved into her flesh.

She found it in the homes of queer families she met across America, whose photographs would form the series Domestic (1995-98).

The subjects of these intimate, everyday portraits, shot in living rooms, bedrooms, backyards and kitchens, were diverse in age, geography, ethnicity, and wealth.

For Opie, documenting this under-represented community served several ends: It was a historical correction, an exercise in inclusivity and a political statement.

In 2008, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum presented Catherine Opie: American Photographer, a mid-career survey of Opie’s work featuring images from the series Domestic, Being and Having (1991) and Portraits (1993–97), which portrayed queer communities in San Francisco and Los Angeles.

“Now, at almost 62 years old, I have these kids come up to me and say: ‘I was nine years old when I saw your Guggenheim show, and it made me feel like I could be OK with the rest of my life.’ And those are the moments you hold so close to your heart,” Opie says.

Today, her activism remains as relevant as ever.

“We have 420 new laws against transsexuals trying to get on the books here in the United States. And I know that homophobia is alive and well in Australia as well,” Opie says.

Self Portrait/Nursing (2004)

In 2001, Opie gave birth to her son, Oliver.

“I finally got a full-time teaching job at Yale with health insurance. I thought: ‘I’m going to have a baby now.’ As I was trying to get pregnant, I met Julie [Burleigh, who Opie later married], and she moved into the house in LA when he was three months old,” she says.

In Self Portrait/Nursing, taken in 2004, Opie holds the blond-haired, milky-skinned Oliver to her breast.

A tattoo adorns Opie’s right shoulder, and the faint scarification of the word “pervert” is still visible across her chest.

Mother and baby gaze into each other’s eyes in a serene scene of maternal love, evoking the classic Madonna and Child of art history.

Domestic bliss doesn’t last forever, and Opie and Burleigh separated in 2021 after more than two decades together.

“[It’s] just yet another chapter,” Opie reflects.

Oliver in a Tutu (2004)

Opie documented her own domestic life for a series titled In and Around Home (2004-05).

In one image in the Heide exhibition, Oliver, a toddler, stands on a chair in front of a washing machine, bathed in golden light.

“Oliver is wearing a USTC shirt, which is a very powerful college football entity here in Los Angeles, but he’s [also] wearing a tiara with a pink tutu — and I love the contradiction of that,” says Opie.

Of all his mother’s works, Oliver’s favourite is Self-Portrait/Cutting.

“He said, ‘You got to live the dream you cut on your back in 1993, and I’m part of what happened with that dream, so it’s the most meaningful to me,” Opie told The Gentlewoman.

Kaine (2007)

High school footballers might seem a surprising choice of subject for Opie, given the fabled animosity between jocks and queer kids at high school.

Opie explained her thinking to The New Yorker in 2017: “There’s a certain kind of equality I’m trying to create, which is what I believe American democracy is about,” she said.

“If I were to pass judgment on, say, football players – that they were the asshole kids who used to beat me up in high school – that’s not really looking.”

Opie checked her assumptions at the door and approached her subjects – such as Kaine, whose portrait features in the Heide exhibition – with empathy.

“They were already being trained to be warriors.”

She also discerned an awkwardness in their teenage physiques.

“Not everybody is hypermasculine who is a football player; some of them have really long arms that feel like they are reaching down to their knees, and they look like they could be ploughed over on the field.”

Untitled #4 (monument/monumental) (2020)

In 2020, Opie began attending Black Lives Matter protests, “bearing witness” to the unrest that had reignited in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis.

At the same time, Opie was faced with the dilemma of how to safely deliver Oliver to college in Louisiana, where classes were proceeding in person despite the COVID-19 pandemic sweeping the nation.

“I looked at Julie, and I said: ‘Well … I think it’s time for another RV trip. Let’s drive him to school … and then let’s take off together so I can document what’s happening in the US right now,'” Opie recalls.

Opie once again traversed the country in an RV, this time accompanied by Burleigh, to see firsthand what had “happened to these different American cities under the Trump administration, as we were going through another [election] cycle … where he really could have won again,” she says.

In Richmond, Virginia, Opie photographed the controversial monument of Confederate general Robert E Lee, its plinth covered in graffiti by protestors (the monument was moved to a museum in 2021).

The image, taken from ground level, shows the imposing 18-metre monument stretching skyward. The sun, seen behind clouds in the top right corner of the photograph, looks lower in the sky, as if setting.

This impression is a trick of framing, explains Opie: “It appears as if the sun is setting on racism in America, but it certainly hasn’t.”

Catherine Opie: Binding Ties runs until July 9 at the Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne.

Wildlife photography can be a tremendously enjoyable genre, but it can also often need a heavy dose of rather expensive specialized equipment. Nonetheless, you can still create fantastic images with affordable cameras and lenses. This useful video tutorial will give you a range of useful tips to help you get the most out of budget equipment and still come home with excellent photos. 

Coming to you from Espen Helland, this great video tutorial will show you a range of useful tips for getting compelling wildlife images from budget gear. The tricky part of wildlife photography is that you are often far away from the action, you need a fast shutter speed to freeze action, and light is often low, all necessitating supertelephoto lenses with wide apertures and advanced cameras with high-level autofocus systems and fast continuous burst rates, which tends to add up in price quite quickly. And while that sort of equipment will certainly make your job easier and give you the best possible image quality, you might be surprised by what you can accomplish with far more affordable gear when it is supplemented by solid technique and knowledge of the environment and animal behavior. Check out the video above for the full rundown from Helland.

After years of being a content creator, photographer, and videographer, Peter Lindgren goes through some things he wishes he’d known before making the leap.

I am far too close to the subject matter to offer any real perspective from the outside, but it has seemed to me for some time that many people who don’t create content underestimate how difficult it is to be a content creator. Woe is me, I know, but the difficulty lies in an unexpected area. If someone who isn’t a content creator has call to create content, they will often be a little slow, but they’ll get it done and possibly enjoy it. Where content creation gets difficult is consistency.

When you have to create content every single day, you realize how difficult that can be. Writers will often talk about the evil blank page and being a content creator is, in essence, taking on the blank page every single day. It is a desirable job and many would love to be a top writer, YouTuber, or social media personality, and more than you might expect have the skills to do it, but very few can keep up the pace for months, let alone years.

Are you a content creator? What do you wish you’d known beforehand?

We lost our imaginative, enthusiastic colleague this weekend.

Although I like photographing people, I never dared to step into the world of street photography. But recently I have tried it a few times, with mixed results. I would like to share my experiences and give some tips for those who like to try this for the first time also.

I always look in wonder at the amazing photos by famous and not-so-famous street photographers. Often these are presented in black and white and that does have a nice feel to it. Since I like black and white photography a lot, I tried that kind of street photography a few times.

Street photography is all about capturing life on the streets of a city. It’s not specifically about capturing people, but it can be a significant part of street photography. At least, that’s what I believe. But capturing people without their explicit consent is something that I find very difficult.

My regular camera isn’t the perfect camera for this kind of photography. A large DSLR or large mirrorless camera feels a bit obtrusive, and I always think strangers feel intimidated when I point my camera at them. After all, a large 50mm, 85mm, or 135mm lens is not that inconspicuous. The last thing I want is a stranger that reacts threateningly, something that seems to happen quite often nowadays.

The Equipment I Use

Street photography is where my small Fujifilm X100V comes in handy. It’s an inconspicuous camera that produces amazing images. It has a fixed focal length with a field of view similar to a 35mm on a full frame. This does mean I have to get close to my subjects. That has its downsides and upsides.

The upside is the connection you get with the subject and the moment you’re capturing. The downside is not being able to maintain my distance. It is almost impossible to shoot without being noticed. I could use my Canon EOS R5 with a longer focal length and keep my distance, of course. But somehow it doesn’t feel right.

I reviewed the Nikon Z fc a while ago. This is a camera that I find also perfect for street photography. It’s small, and with the standard zoom lens, it doesn’t feel as threatening as my larger Canon. I got some nice photos back then, and people were rather interested in that retro-looking camera instead of being bothered by being photographed.

This is similar to what I encountered with my Fujifilm X100t. Just like with the Nikon Z fc, people believe you are photographing with film rolls. That makes it interesting, and suddenly they don’t seem to feel threatened anymore. It makes street photography a fun thing to do.

A Bit of Street Photography in London

Unfortunately, there is no real big city close to my home. There are some that almost fit the description, but these don’t have that real big-city vibe. The people living there are different from the big city folk, somehow. It’s something I noticed when I was visiting London a few days during the SWPA 2023 event for Sony. I use the free time I had to walk through the city of London, and I took my Fujifilm camera with me (sorry about that, Sony).

I used the black and white film simulation profile while shooting in raw, and I used manual focus, set to the hyperfocal distance. This way there was no need to wait for the autofocus to lock onto something. I also played around with intentional camera movement, which was possible thanks to the built-in neutral density filter. Those few hours in the city of London were a lot of fun. Not for the impressive landmarks, but for life on the streets.

The results of my first steps into street photography didn’t produce any world-class photos. But that wasn’t my goal. I just wanted to get familiar with this kind of photography. I do like to think some of my photos are worth keeping. In other words, I am happy with some results.

Lessons Learned So Far

There are some lessons learned, for sure. I know the technique known as zone focusing is quite a useful way for street photography. Just use the hyperfocal distance of your aperture in combination with the focal length, or predetermine the distance you would like to shoot and set your focus distance at that setting.

Often, this only works for short focal lengths. If you want to use a telelens, focusing is mandatory. But when zone focusing is possible, it allows you to shoot inconspicuously from the waist, without ever looking through the viewfinder.

Although I used aperture priority a lot, I believe it can be a good choice to set the exposure manually. Especially during the daytime, when the buildings produce deep shadows in the harsh sunlight. Since daylight doesn’t change in brightness that much, it becomes much easier to set the proper exposure once, and forget about it.

Aperture priority is also possible, but you need to keep an eye on the exposure compensation. If the sunlight gets regularly obscured by clouds, or if you shoot at the end of the day when the light intensity changes rapidly, aperture priority is much faster. But if it’s a sunny day, setting the exposure once will be enough. As long as the light doesn’t change.

Know the City and Its Inhabitants

There is one last thing I noticed when I was walking through the streets of London and along the South Banks of the Thames. If you know the city, it becomes easier to capture great photos. You learn where and when the light is at its best, and what the best locations are. This way you can be at the right location at the right time.

You will learn when the people are passing by and perhaps even notice patterns. You will be prepared. On top of that, if you can go back more often, you increase the chances of capturing unique moments, with great light, amazing shadows, and interesting people.

These are my findings with street photography. Take a look at the photos in this article to judge if I’m on the right track. I know I still have to learn a lot, but it always takes time to master a certain type of photography. The most important thing is having fun with it. And that’s what I had.

If you have tips or advice for street photography, feel free to share in the comments below. Perhaps it will help me to take another step in this interesting kind of photography.

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