A street photographer always has to be in stalking mode. If you want to capture a stolen moment, you have to make stealth into an art form. Find your subject, and, with your camera round your neck and finger on the shutter release, calmly approach them without looking at their face. Make sure you prepare the frame well and take a series of shots, and then just keep walking as if nothing happened. It isn’t always possible. This student, who was working on her laptop opposite the entrance to the Aula Magna, caught me in the act. That’s why it’s sometimes better to sit down on a bench in the street or in a park and just wait for the right moment. As the Ukrainian photographer and graphic reporter Arthur Fellig Weegee once said: “People are so wonderful that a photographer has only to wait for that breathless moment to capture what he wants on film”.

22 January, 2014