HOW & WHY THE GREATS OF STREET PHOTOGRAPHY USED FLASH & MAYBE WE SHOULD TOO…

Flash is something that has always been lost on me when taking street photos, but I know some legends of street photography have created some great work using flash. So, I want to do what I can to understand the nuance, the controversy, the techniques, and everything that's involved with it.

First Thoughts w/Flash

One of the main difficulties with this, and one of the main reasons I haven’t been shooting street a lot lately, is that it’s raining like this almost every single day. And it’s been really hard for me to find the motivation to go out and take photos after I’ve been at work all day, knowing full and well how wet I’m going to get.

But I should really try and change that mindset because you come across a lot of things in the rain that you wouldn’t otherwise. And it was those things that really made going out in these conditions worth it.

The only real negative that I came away with after I embraced the rain is that I had to use this bag to cover my camera up to keep it from getting wet, and it kept fogging up, making it really difficult to compose my shots.

Tavepong & Songkran

Tavepong Pratoomwong is one of the people who inspired me to make photos in this condition. He created photos during Songkran, which is a water festival that takes place in Thailand every year. And I think the results that he got are absolutely amazing. They really show the true potential of what can come when you combine flash and water elements in your street photography.

Rain Flash Experience

One of the main benefits that I found shooting flash in the rain is that there are still people out, but far fewer. So, you’re able to isolate your subjects in places that you normally wouldn’t be able to and get frames that you normally wouldn’t be able to get. The alleys in and around Chinatown are normally packed with people, so on your average day when you try to create photos in that area there can be way too much going on and no real focal point. An additional thing I noticed is that even though I hardly shoot color, I can see that’s something you should totally take advantage of in these conditions. The vibrant colors that come out with all of the rain jackets are amazing, and they give you a color palette that you normally wouldn’t be able to work with.

Bruce Davidson

Another source of inspiration was Bruce Davidson’s Subway Project. The images in this project are incredible, and a lot of them are made using flash. While he didn’t exclusively use flash for this project, he did use it often enough to make photos that wouldn’t have been possible otherwise. The flash photos that he made for this project have a unique look, and those are the ones that stand out most to me. There are a lot of environments here in Bangkok that I’m not normally able to shoot, but the use of flash has made me reconsider what would be possible.

Flash Controversy?

One of the reasons I haven’t used flash that much in my street photography is it’s kind of controversial and it gets a really bad rep. But in my own experience, people weren’t really that bothered by it. I think it all kind of comes down to the vibe that you put out there in terms of the energy that you get back. I had one single person call me out, and when they asked me to delete the photo, I did so immediately and then we both moved on with our lives. But I can understand why it gets such a bad rep because it looks so invasive when certain people go about taking these photos. They get so close to their subjects and move into their personal space.

Mark Cohen

One of the people who’s known for being so invasive is Mark Cohen. But when you see behind-the-scenes footage of him taking photos, people just don’t really seem to care. Everyone who has their photo taken by him just kind of shrugs it off. They look, they wonder, they’re concerned to see what happened, but they don’t look incredibly bothered by it. I think he has this really weird, goofy vibe to how he shoots that makes people not really put off by him. So that could be part of it. And there are a lot of people who take this style who look a lot more malicious when they carry it out. So maybe it really is the vibe that you put out there that informs how it’s received.

Proximity Flash Experience

I’m well aware that I wasn’t getting that close or invasive as Cohen does, and maybe that’s why I wasn’t getting a lot of backlash. But at the end of the day, I think that flash or not, street is street. The people who are going to get mad about it are going to get mad about it, and the people who won’t, won’t. It just is what it is. And really, you don’t have to get in anybody’s face if you don’t want to, but you still want to try flash for street. For me, I found that the inanimate objects that I shot with flash made them so much more compelling, and it really got the wheels turning on different projects that I could do using flash. It gives them a quality that I can’t really describe in a meaningful way, but if I had to put it one way, I would say that it makes objects feel more alive.

Martin Parr

Martin Parr’s project Real Food creates images using a ring flash and a macro lens. The results are these really bizarre, weird-looking images that are created by only taking pictures of food, and they carry over into the rest of the quirky work he’s created, falling in line with the rest of his sense of humor. There are endless things to capture in this fashion, and the mundane is something we all end up shooting in the street. So, it only makes sense to me to adopt techniques that make the mundane less ordinary.

Bruce Gilden

If you’re talking about flash and street, you obviously can’t do it without bringing up Bruce Gilden. I think he’s been covered to death on social media because he’s one of the people that give street photography a bad name from an outsider’s perspective. I don’t think he’s as unbelievably terrible as he’s been vilified to be. Some of the work is a bit too much, and I can’t say I’m a fan of it, but other work is incredible and I love it to death. So in some ways, he’s an influence on my creativity, and in other ways, I think he should be a big influence on what street photographers should or should not put out into the world.

Night Flash Experience

I tried to keep going at night after this long day of shooting, but I just found it to be kind of boring. There aren’t that many places in Bangkok where you can go and shoot at night and find it to be lively, where it wouldn’t be controversial for you to take a photo. If you know, you know. So, you end up kind of just shooting in the same places over and over again, doing laps. I just found it kind of boring, I wasn’t that into it and I didn’t get that many shots at night. One thing I do love is the shutter drag effect combined with flash, but it would take a lot more practice for me to get the desired effect. For instance, right now I’m trying to understand what background elements would work best for it.

Other Flash Experiences

The extreme contrast that flash creates between subjects and backgrounds is really appealing to me, and that’s something that makes me want to come back to this another time. It’s something I’m drawn to replicate because of all the Japanese photographers that I’ve been influenced by and so much of the work that I’ve covered on this channel. It also gives a lot of photos this quality that I describe as dynamic, nightmarish, or otherworldly to some extent. I found that one of the biggest challenges of this was being required to shoot from the hip and not being able to compose my shots fast enough, and this ended up resulting in a lot of awkward frames. All in all, these couple of days of shooting with flash made me really want to fully understand it so I can try it with film and see what the results are like with that. I’m really far from that, and a lot of the decent shots that I got can be attributed to dumb luck. It steadily became clear to me that having any different kind of background lighting element made a huge difference in the quality of the shot and the variety that I got.

Tatsuo Suzuki

I mention Tatsuo Suzuki on this channel all the time. Obviously, he’s a huge influence on me, but I have to mention him again if I’m making this blog. If you want to learn more about him, I already made a full video on his work, and I would suggest checking that out.

Should You Try Flash?

Trying new things in photography is incredibly necessary if we want to grow as photographers. If you’ve thought about shooting flash but you’ve been worried about the kind of interactions that you might have, then maybe it’s just not for you. But if this blog has in any way, shape, or form made you reconsider that, I think you should give it a go because who knows, it might be the spark that you need to create something that’s truly unique and your own.