If you’ve always seen street photography as a primarily black & white tradition it becomes easy to take colour for granted. This is a mistake. Life on the streets is a rich pageant of color. Look at the clothing, streets signs, cars and how the light interacts with everything in between.
“When I began, in all my innocence, the first roll of film I ever put in a camera was a color film, because it seemed to me the world was in color and you’d take pictures of the world as it looked.” – Joel Meyerowitz
Precise use of color enables us to bring vividness and pictorial intensity to the fore.
The simplest method to seeing the streets in color is to focus your attention on primary colors. Look for things like the deep red of a jacket, the yellow of a taxi, the dark blue of a painted painted building. Once you train your eye to see in this way you’ll be able to spot the subtler tones in between and, eventually, complimentary tones.
To gain a greater understanding of color street photography start with the work of Joel Meyerowitz and Saul Leiter.
- Use color to try & capture a feeling – blue is relaxing, red more urgent.
- Look for deep contrasts – a colorful hat set against a flat grey building
- Seek out primary colors
- Puddles & reflections often make color blends appealing to the eye
