a PRO Tokyo Street Photographer's Advice

Thank you so much for clicking on this video. If you want more tips on how to improve your photography or improve your videography, queue up my playlist link right up here. First off, I just wanna say I am beyond shocked how many of you guys really enjoy the video I put out on street photography with Professor Hines back in October 2019. I cannot believe it inspires so many of you guys to do your own street photography with an 85 millimeter lens, and you guys are absolutely killing it. Me and Professor Hines are loving all of the results, so please keep tagging us on Instagram. And what made me really happy with the result of that video was the sheer fact that I absolutely enjoyed making it. I was seriously grinning from ear to ear while I was editing that video, because seriously, Professor Hines' work truly does inspire me, and to be able to sit down and chat with him and learn a few things with him, and then to be able to put out a video to inspire you guys as well just empowers the photography community as a whole. And going forward in 2020, I wanna interview more photographers and more creators that personally inspires me. And actually, I got a chance to hang out with another street photographer while I was in Japan last month. His name is Lucas Polka, and the things that I really love about his work in particular are his framings, the juxtaposition of objects and subjects in his photography, and especially his color tones. And I think you guys will really enjoy his work as well. Also, props to Lucas for sticking it out the entire evening with me because he was still getting over his cold, but he refused to cancel the shoot. So here are five timeless street photography tips from another master. Take it away, Lucas. Hey guys, my name is Lucas Polka. I'm a photographer based here in Tokyo. I've been here over 10 years. I focus on urban and street photography, and I quite love it. I love it a lot, and I tend to focus on night photography, so I usually am shooting in the evenings. I do daytime as well, but the night in Tokyo is really what fascinates me the most. All right, so the first tip I wanna share with you guys is that photography is about mindfulness. And what I mean by that is that you have to go into street photography with a very open mind. You don't wanna be thinking about a lot of other stuff. You don't wanna be distracted by your phone that's in your pocket, messages going off. I like to just take in what's happening around me, the sounds, the smells, and of course the sights of my environment. And that way, I'm very focused on what's happening, and I'm most likely to recognize those interesting moments and actually capture them. So to that end, I also recommend, I do feel that your camera should really get out of the way, which means you really have to set your settings beforehand and really understand what they all do so you're not fiddling with it. So of course, you should learn how to shoot manual and understand what all the settings in the camera do so that you have that kind of ingrained, those fundamentals. But when I actually go out shooting, I tend to set my camera on aperture priority mode with an auto ISO, with a maximum ISO of, for example, 6400 is what I choose, and a minimum shutter speed of 1 over 250 because I like to shoot things that are moving people, and I want them to be sharp. That's why I choose that speed. And with those settings, I don't have to worry about very much except for my aperture setting and my exposure compensation, which only change here and there, case by case. And that way, I don't have to focus much on my camera. In a similar way, I don't use zoom lenses. I mean, I do sometimes, but I prefer primes. I like a 40 millimeter prime and a 28 millimeter prime. Those are my go-tos. For the same reason, there's just less to think about in terms of the camera, and I get to really focus in on the moment. It helps me be mindful of my situation. And some of the best photos I've ever taken were thanks to this kind of approach. The one that you should be seeing now is a photo I took in Shibuya almost 10 years ago. And it's of a lady just kind of standing there in front of a yakitori restaurant with the smoke coming out. And she's standing in an interesting way and looking behind her. And I would have missed this photo. In fact, I wasn't even out shooting that day. I had my camera, but I was just heading somewhere to meet a friend or something. But even when I'm just walking around, for other reasons, I'm going somewhere, I employ this mindfulness technique and I'm observing my environment. And it would have been very easy to walk right past her and not even notice this scene. And so thanks to that mindfulness approach, I was able to recognize the scene. My settings were dialed in, so I just took the photo and it was perfect. And I got a great shot. It's a shot that I'm quite proud of to this day, and I've gotten great feedback on this photo over the years. So it's one of my proudest photos I've ever taken, and it certainly comes down thanks to this mindfulness approach to photography. All right, so tip number two is don't be afraid to fail. Street photography, and I think in general, any kind of creative pursuit is very much about failure. You're gonna try stuff and you're gonna fail. And also don't be afraid to break the rules, which is kind of a sort of failure in a way, right? If you're not following the rules, you might be thinking, oh my God, am I making mistakes? And so what I mean by that is that there's a lot of sort of preconceptions about what is a good photograph or what photography should be. There's a lot of stuff you see online and you think, oh, if my photo needs to be good, it needs to be like those photos. So I think it's very important to kind of ignore all that stuff. If you always follow the rules, you're not gonna do anything original. And more concretely, the kind of rules I'm talking about are things like you've heard a million times, like the rule of thirds, or you have to have your horizon straight, or don't ever blow out the highlights on your histogram because that's not good, or a photo needs to be exposed like this, or whatever. There's all these particular things that we've heard, all these rules, right? And I think it's good to try some new stuff. And I have a great quote that encapsulates that and that I've heard, and that's, you'll never discover new oceans if you don't move away from the shore. So you have to go into kind of uncharted waters creatively in order to find stuff. And one of my favorite photos, in fact, it's a whole series of photos, I'll show you a couple of them, but some of the best ones are these photos where I like moving the camera in interesting ways. So I do long exposures, one second, 10 seconds, whatever, and then I move the camera in some way. And of course, in the beginning especially, nine out of 10 times these photos were terrible. It was just random blurry messes, and I was like, oh, that looks kind of cool, but they weren't actually good shots. But over time, by experimenting with this, I sort of developed a couple concepts that I like that I actually can employ effectively again and again in different situations and get cool shots out of it. And here's my favorite one, it's this swirling effect where what I do is I put my camera against the window on a piece of glass, and then I make the exposure like one or two seconds, and I just kind of spin the camera along the glass, kind of like the steering wheel of a car, like that kind of spin. And it creates this perfectly circular swirl, which is pretty neat. And then one day I tried this while riding in an elevator that was going down. So instead of a circular swirl, I got this kind of spirally effect. And the result is cool, it's very unique. It doesn't look like anything else I've ever seen. I was very proud to, well, proud is maybe too strong a word, but I was very just happy with that. I just kind of like, wow, cool, I discovered something unique. And I wouldn't have done that if I already assumed that by trying it, ah, this photo's gonna be bad, it's not gonna work out. So it was important just to not worry about that failure and just try it anyway. So tip number three is creativity is the product of curiosity and rigor. And I blatantly stole that from an artist named Chuck Close, who's a visual artist from the 20th century. And I like his work, but I just really like this quote, this thing that he said, he was given an interview and he said something like, and I'm really paraphrasing here, but he said something like, inspiration is for amateurs, the rest of us just get out and do the work. And so what I find is that to be creative, you really just have to put the time in. You need to, with street photography, for example, you gotta go out and try stuff again and again and again. Another way that this is put usually is this idea of called work the scene. So the idea is that you take that first shot, but then you just work that scene. You try other angles, you try to get low, get close, get far, you know, look around for surfaces or objects in the scene that you can incorporate into the shot. I put this to practice to get this photo that you're seeing now. It's a photo of this lady in a mask walking by this interesting background. And then in front of her is this, you know, white reflective surface, which creates this strange, surreal kind of abstract scene. And I've shot at this spot over the years countless times. I kept coming back to this spot because I always liked the obvious shot, which was this bright grid thing in the background with the white lights. And I thought, yeah, that was pretty cool. And I got lots of shots of people against that. But it wasn't until I, you know, really started looking around deeper in that scene that I realized, oh, but there's this extra trick I can do with this reflective surface. And then it took me, I don't know how many tries of terrible photos of people, you know, blurry, out of focus, didn't quite come out right, yada yada, before I got this one shot, which really did work out. So it really shows that you do have to work the scene. You have to iterate. You have to work on stuff sometimes. You don't just roll up and take a good photo and that's it. So iteration, working the scene, rigor and curiosity and trying stuff. That's the tip. That's what you gotta do. And actually I have a video on my channel on iXplore about this exact photo and how to take it. So Jason's gonna throw up that link and you guys can check out in more detail what I mean by working the scene. Before we move on to the next two tips, actually three, three more tips. Lucas actually threw in a little bonus for you guys at the end, oops, spoilers. So definitely stay tuned for that, but I wanna quickly interrupt this video to thank our friends over at storyblocks.com for making this video possible. Some of the subtle B-roll you might have seen in this video are actually stock footage from storyblocks.com. And the reason for that is because while I was busy capturing Lucas in action while we were out on the streets, I didn't have too much time getting establishing shots of the area that we were in. Thank goodness for Storyblocks for having some B-roll of Tokyo in the rain because there was no way I would have been able to get my own clips the next night because it didn't rain the next night. And believe it or not, these little clips does help slightly elevate the story that we're trying to tell in this video. Not only that, but it also helps add visual variety to make the content more engaging. You might have known this already, but I've actually been using Storyblocks for my own YouTube as well as client projects over a year now, and it's definitely saved my butts more times than I can count. So check out storyblocks.com slash Jason Vong and see how it can also help you on your next project. Thanks for listening, now back to the video. Tip number four is learn from the masters, but don't lose sight of your own vision. And so what I mean by that is that of course you should look to great photographers that are out there and take things from their work that you like and apply it to your work so you can learn some new skills or different approaches to how to shoot. You know, you kind of, you're standing on the shoulders of giants, so to speak, right? But in the same time, it's important to maintain your own creative vision and you wanna share the stories and the ideas that are unique to you. You don't want to just copy somebody else. There's a fine line between those two, of course, but it's just an important thing to keep in mind. And so for example, one of my favorite photographers, someone whose work I've been looking at for years now, almost since I started doing street photography, is Saul Leiter. Here you can see some of my, a couple of my favorite photos of his that I've always looked up to. And I try to apply some of the things from his work that I really like. His use of color, his use of an indirect way of photographing people, so it's a silhouette or kind of distorted, shooting through glass surfaces or reflections and shooting in foul weather is a big theme in his work. But in particular, his use of color is what really I love about his work. And so I apply that for my own shots. And so some of the shots you see here now, these are mine, and you can see that there are parallels, but at the same time, they're different. Because of course I shoot in Tokyo and I shoot a lot of times at night, and there's neon and colors, and the colors are different than the ones you would see in Saul's work. And he was shooting on film and I shoot on digital, so there are differences. But I try to just take that and go into my own, in my own direction with those ideas. And I think that's the important thing, is to apply someone, the things you learn from someone else, but make them your own, okay? And so it's important to do both. I think if you try to work in a vacuum, you're gonna miss out on a big advantage of learning from other people. But if you overly emulate someone else's style, you just end up creating the same stuff. And that's not that interesting in the end. You wanna do your own unique thing. And tip number five, smile. That's it, just smile. So having that positive approach in mind, here's a couple photos that I used that approach in. So here's a nice gentleman just eating some ice cream on the side of the road and he looked pretty cool. I liked the lighting and he just, it looked kind of funny him just sort of sitting there and enjoying ice cream while wearing his hat and his suit. And so I just took a photo right away because I didn't wanna ruin the moment. I wanted that candid shot. But of course he saw me because I'm inches away from him and he heard the shutter. But then I didn't run away, I just smiled. I said, oh, I said in Japanese to him, I said, oishisou, which means looks delicious. And he kind of laughed like, yeah, it is delicious. You can buy it right over there in that vending machine. And I was like, oh, okay, thank you. And I moved on and it was great. It was a fun interaction. And this other one is a gentleman who works in Akihabara in this tiny little hole in the wall electronics shop. And this one I actually asked him in the first place because I just thought I'll be nice. I don't wanna shove a camera in his face. Like I said, I usually prefer to shoot first and then chat with people because I want candid but this one was posed, but that's okay. So I just said to him, I was like, hey, can I take your picture? And he said, yeah, sure. He smiled and took a nice photo of him in his little stall. And I chatted with him too. I said, hey, how long you've been doing this? In fact, he's been doing that for, I think he told me 30 years he was working at this same little shop. And then his father before him for like another 20. Anyway, it was cool to just chat with him and get to know the guy. And in fact, it made the photo even more rewarding for me, more satisfying to get that because I learned a little bit about this man and what he's been doing in his little family-owned business for however many decades. So yeah, that kind of friendly, positive approach has gone a long way for me to create interesting shots. All right, guys. So I want to leave you with one last little bit of motivation before we end the video. And that is kind of what I would have told myself 10 years ago when some days I was lacking motivation to go out and shoot. What I would say to me then and I say to you guys now is don't think too much about how you're failing or how your photos are not good. Just go out and do it. Go out and have fun. Don't take it too seriously. Enjoy what you're doing. And by having fun and by doing it consistently and getting out and just enjoying it, you will eventually produce interesting shots that you can be very happy with and proud of. So that's what I leave you guys with. Get out there and make sure you keep shooting. So what I would love for you guys to do is to check out our YouTube channel, which is called iXplore, E-Y-E-X-P-L-O-R-E. And we have instructional videos on the channel about photography, street photography included. If you want to learn more about how I shoot and how I approach different situations, you can learn that there. And we also provide photography workshops. It's the same name, iXplore.com. And if you ever find yourself in Tokyo or anywhere in Japan, Kyoto and Osaka as well, check out one of our workshops. They're nice little two and a half hour to six hour events, experiences. And we do hands-on photo training. And if that's something you'd be interested in, we'd love to hear from you. And if you have any questions about photography or anything that I mentioned in this video, feel free to send me a message through the iXplore YouTube channel. And I would love to get back to you and give you some advice on your photography. My own personal Instagram is lkazphoto. Feel free to follow me there. And also you can send me questions there as well. So thanks for watching guys. And I'll catch you later.