Street Photography Composition - Symmetry and Silhouettes

This weeks post is a continuation of my series on, what I call, The Art of Street Photography.

I believe that street photography requires actually more knowledge of composition and mood than any of the other photography genres because you need to assess the scene very quickly to decide what photography techniques will help you to draw and keep the viewer's attention at your photo and hopefully even afterwards in their minds.

We have a situation
Although street photography is about capturing unposed scenes, it does not mean that you do not have to pay attention to good photography practices such as composition. If you don't, you will most likely just create a mess, and, unless the scene in front of you is really spectacular, nobody will give it a second thought.

In this photo, which I took through the train window as we left the station, I used two composition elements, namely; Silhouette and Symmetry.

These two techniques work very well together as both emphasise the graphical elements of the scene.

I took two photos, the first as I noticed the scene playing off on the opposite platform, and then, quickly changed my settings to underexpose the scene and wait until we were facing the two pillars straight on before taking the second photo. The first photo was a waste of my shutter count! (unlike other people, I am actually very proud of having a very low shutter count!)

Creating a silhouette of people is a great way to add drama and intrigue to a scene as you remove expressions while emphasising gestures.

Symmetry is a technique where you split a scene in half with the two halves being (almost) mirror images of each other. By using symmetry in photography you draw the attention to the middle of the scene, and in this case is the middle the place where this little drama is playing off.

The fact that the figures are silhouettes add that extra intrigue as we do not exactly know what happened to the man's foot.

This is my weekly #streetphotography contribution.

Hope you like it.