Street photography in London – personal work

As well as photographing weddings I like to do some personal photography for myself, it gives me a chance to try things out that I can then use in my wedding photography. A particular passion of mine is street photography, I was in London yesterday to photograph a wedding drinks reception at The Langham hotel and afterwards I arranged to meet clients whose wedding I am photographing in a few weeks time, we sat drinking coffee at Costa on Great Portland Street and noticed a huge police presence in the area. After the meeting the reason for the police became evident as protestors gathered with banners.

What is street photography? 

According to Wikipedia, street photography is photography conducted for the purpose of art that features unmeditated encounters in public places. Basically street photography is about capturing unposed and unplanned images. For me is similar to how I approach a wedding, capturing unplanned moments as they happen. Photographing strangers on the street does bring a few challenges though as the subjects are not always willing participants, for me I find the best way is to get in close with a wide angle as for some reason people seem to ignore you more with that approach rather than standing back with a long lens.

How does this relate to wedding photography?

One issue with being a professional photographer is you often spend so much time photographing your genre, be that weddings, commercial or portraits, that you end up not photographing anything else. I feel it is important to get outside of your comfort zone and photograph new things in order to stay fresh. Skills learnt in street photography are directly transferable to documentary wedding photography.

All photographs taken with a Canon 6D and 24mm F1.4L lens.

And for something calmer, here are some of the other images I took around London.