How to Shoot Street Photography in Sydney

Photography Tips  •  Street Photography

For some photographers, film photography feels more personal than digital photography. This short film by Rob Norton, about a Sydney based photographer Markus Andersen, is a look inside the mind of a film photographer, following his thought process and trying to understand what goes into making a great image. Andersen shoots primarily with a Leica MP and 120 film, and at times on his iPhone. The film was shot on location all around Sydney and has been exhibited in several cities around the world:

What Makes a Great Image?

“You can do a pretty image. You know, person looking past a wall, and there’s the silhouette. You can crack of a frame and it’s going to be a cool image. But it’s not a great image. There has to be layering in the images, there has to be, maybe a story to tell. There has to be that one art element that just brings it out of the ordinary into something special. And they are really hard to find.”

What makes a great image?

Street Photography

“There’s life. There’s canyons of metal and steel and concrete. It’s like being dropped into the belly of the beast. It’s the fact that you sort of look into it and the people around you and they kind of envelop you and you’ve got to let the people wash over and that’s about making order out of that chaos. And it’s almost like being born on to the street.”

Shooting in the “Belly of the Beast”

“I love creating imagery. It’s the most important thing in the world for me. It’s not about being well known and famous; it’s about that the more successful you become the more time you have to shoot. And that’s how it works. As opposed to having to find time between jobs or commercial work or life.”

Street photography in Sydney

Finding Great Images

“When you go out and shoot you don’t necessarily shoot great images. You try. But those little moments times when everything comes together, it’s quite incredible. To me the reason why it’s important is because it’s unique. It’s hard. It’s a hard image to get. And the things that are hard to get you really have to search for, look for, that’s what becomes great, that’s what becomes remembered.”

Street photography in Sydney

Persistence

“If you’ve got to build steam you can never stop. You have to just keep going and going. And even if you get somewhere then you have to go harder and harder. Because if you stop, for a moment, it’s going to catch up with you. You’re going to slow down and you’re going to lose that momentum and then it just fades.”