can it be street if shot with a 70-210 zoom?

Football photography could be much improved IMO if all those pussy whipped sports photographers stopped shooting from the sidelines with those huge white telephotos on monopods and actually got off their arses and made an effort to get out on the field with a rangefinder with a 28mm lens and get some real action ... what's their problem?

:angel:
 
Keith said:
Football photography could be much improved IMO if all those pussy whipped sports photographers stopped shooting from the sidelines with those huge white telephotos on monopods and actually got off their arses and made an effort to get out on the field with a rangefinder with a 28mm lens and get some real action ... what's their problem?

:angel:
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... and the same can be told about the wildlife photographers!
 
Keith said:
Football photography could be much improved IMO if all those pussy whipped sports photographers stopped shooting from the sidelines with those huge white telephotos on monopods and actually got off their arses and made an effort to get out on the field with a rangefinder with a 28mm lens and get some real action ... what's their problem?

:angel:
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Like this Winogrand shot:

PH99421.jpg
 
jsrockit said:
Many people believe street photos have to have people in them... I don't. To me, it doesn't matter your approach (wide angle / tele / etc.). If you are on the streets taking pictures of scenarios / objects that only exist in the streets, then it is street photography.
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You are free to call it wahatever you want, but for me and at least a few others, if a picture has no person in it, it's not street photography. It could be natural landscape, urban landscape, still life, abstract, or pet photography, but not street. I'm okay to agree to disagree with you on this.
 
Carlos M said:
To me, street photography is showing people in the public environment and how they fit into and interact with it/each other.
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I agree. But could be showing streets in a people environment. Or without the people. All photos are about the photographer. If not, it's just a picture, and someone else has probably taken a better one. BTW, I just bought a Canon S95. It's a point and shoot. But doesn't have to be. Nothing wrong with looking like a tourist when you are one.
 
I agree, w/the qualification that I think "not many [street] shots work with a very long lens."

yanidel said:
Whatever works for you, there are no rule.

Reality is that not many shots work with a very long lens. You need to kneel, bend, and stay still so you restrict yourself from many potential shots. The real issue with the tele lenses is that this choice is often not dictated by a style decision, but a behavourial one : people don't dare interacting so they shoot from far away.
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jsrockit said:
Like this Winogrand shot:

PH99421.jpg
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This shot fascinated me from the start (except I hate the Horns), Winogrand was actually able to include all 22 players in the frame. This being said, Winogrand also got injured pretty bad while covering another game and he could not work for months. Probably an example why a lens longer than 28mm might be the norm in American football ;)
 
For me, street photography should show interaction between 2 or more people, and/or between 1 or more person and their environment, in a public space. That's my personal/working definition for street photography.
 
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Here is one 100% street and 0% human, and it ain't taken with a tele either :p
DSC00839.jpg


Serious though, here is one I wish to have a longer focal length so that I can be further back and not have my shadow show up in the frame.
DSC00847.jpg


or dare I say, CROP?
 
We have more personal opinions being expressed here than anything else. There are no hard and fast rules, and to state that something as arbitrary as the focal length of the lens defines an image as not being a street photograph would be dogmatic. It's in the eye of the beholder. So yes, Virginia, street photographs may be taken with zoom lenses. You just have to believe.
 
Its like Jazz, if you think you know what Jazz is, then you have no clue whatsoever about Jazz... For the simple reason that no single great jazz musician has ever commented on what jazz is, except poetic abstract reasonings now and then.

If you have in your head an idea of what street photography is, then you're not a street photographer.
 
ebino said:
Its like Jazz, if you think you know what Jazz is, then you have no clue whatsoever about Jazz... For the simple reason that no single great jazz musician has ever commented on what jazz is, except poetic abstract reasonings now and then.

If you have in your head an idea of what street photography is, then you're not a street photographer.[/QUOTE]

This sounds like a clever thing to say, but it really doesn't hold up to rational review. You should have an idea about what you're doing in order to do it.
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It is the subject matter that determines the genre of a photograph, not what focal length was used.
 
FrankS said:
[

If you have in your head an idea of what street photography is, then you're not a street photographer.[/QUOTE]

This sounds like a clever thing to say, but it really doesn't hold up to rational review. You should have an idea about what you're doing in order to do it.
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You're right, rationality has nothing to do with street photography, or for that matter poetry, or Jazz, or anything that does not fit in the small human-created system called rationality.

This is not, "you can do this", "you can't do that", this is creativity and everything is permitted... Its up to the photographer to define his limits, no one else can tell him what to do, and what not to do.
 
Yeah, that part I can agree with, just not this: "If you have in your head an idea of what street photography is, then you're not a street photographer."
 
FrankS said:
You are free to call it wahatever you want, but for me and at least a few others, if a picture has no person in it, it's not street photography.
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So that leaves out most of Atget's work and an awful lot of Kertesz's, Strand's, Koudelka's, and even a significant chunk of HCB's and Robert Frank's stuff.

Sorry, but that's vastly too restrictive as a criterion, and I reject it outright.
 
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