from the hip

Street photography has always been extremely alluring to me; it’s like a safari and scavenger hunt all in one. Sometimes you get nothing, sometimes there’s too much to shoot at once. It is immensely spontaneous and often not rewarding in the way you intended. All you need to do is observe.

Due to street photography’s mass accessibility with higher quality cameras in phones as well as lower cost cameras, street photography has become somewhat en vogue and diluted with material that is embarrassingly cliché or is not actually street photography (ie: there are no posed photos in street photography). Street photography is about authenticity, not contrived juxtaposition or interaction with the subject.

There are many ways to approach street photography. This project is titled after one of my favorite styles of shooting, shooting from the hip. The term from the hip is pretty self-explanatory—the photographer doesn’t need to look through a viewfinder or at a display to see what they are taking. They can set the camera to the appropriate exposure for the conditions and manually focus to a depth they anticipate they will be from intended subjects, then use intuition and experience to frame each shot.

You may notice a lot of these photos are from Berlin, which is an excellent city for street photography due to the diversity, extensive public transportation and a relatively high population density.

from the hip - stairs
from the hip - metro crowd
from the hip - juice lady
from the hip - coffee shop
from the hip - snow
from the hip - benign passenger
from the hip - Alex
from the hip - tracks (M10 S Nordbahnhof)
from the hip - wait
from the hip - hat man
from the hip - mist
from the hip - yellow light
from the hip - backpack crew
from the hip - Hermannstrasse
from the hip - train girls
from the hip - commute
from the hip - ambient line
from the hip - Chinese food
from the hip - skeptical
from the hip - night crowd/street energy