If you live in urban areas, you must feel the vibrancy and energy around your place frequently. The best thing about these locations is the raw beauty that attracts the visual creators towards them. However, if you have tried to conduct urban photography 101 for your photography website, it is not an easy task to capture all of these characteristics on camera.
There are numerous factors that you must take into account while conducting photography in urban areas. The factors could be selecting the right gear and settings, and choosing the best subject and composition for the content. Therefore, we have created an overview of photography in urban areas and how you can integrate this work on your photography website.
What is Urban Photography?
Urban photography is defined as the visual representation of urban areas and everything associated with their environment. The environment will include factors, such as the geometric and architectural structures, to people and all other living organisms. This photography can coincide with other genres, such as architectural, self-portrait, and fine art photography.
There is a huge misconception floating around about urban photographers that they are the same as street photographers. However, these terms are not interchangeable terms and they represent two different types of photography. The purpose and objectives draw a comparison between both of these photography types.
Tips for Photography in Urban Areas
1. Explore Your Surroundings
According to research, around 55% of the world’s population are living in urban areas. Therefore, urban photography has become a very obvious choice for these people to add to their skills. Even if you are not living in the urban areas, your house would likely be very close to one. The first tip that we can give in regards to photography in urban areas is to explore your surroundings. Take a casual walk around your place and get your camerawork going.
Image taken from Strikingly User’s Website
As an urban photographer, you must have the mindset of seizing the opportunity whenever it comes. When you think about taking a new photo, you may envision different locations that dominate the biggest Instagram accounts in the world. However, it is important to note that you can take photos that are as unique as your backyard. This is why it is important to keep your camera with you wherever you go and do the camerawork with whatever you visualize.
2. Understand Light
One of the obvious urban photography tips that you will be told is that there is no photography without light. Therefore, if you want to make the most out of your photography career, you must understand the factors surrounding light. Even if you are unaware of the theory, you may have become accustomed to the beautiful colors of the golden hours of photography more than once. There are numerous photography apps in the app store that you can download and get to know about these tracking periods.
Even though the golden hour is considered to be the best time when it comes to taking natural-light shots, it doesn’t mean that you should abandon your camera for the rest of the day. There are numerous photography books that you can purchase and learn about the impact of light in every photography scene. If you go through at least a handful of them, it will evolve you as a photographer.
3. Pay Attention to all Details
By default, most of the urban photographers around the globe try to look at the genre as the metropolitan version of landscape photography. As a consequence, most of their photographs contain huge spaces and wide-angle shots. Even though there is nothing wrong with this urban photography approach, it is important for you to know that photography in urban areas is more than just about the skylines.
Image taken from Strikingly User’s Website
As you walk down the street, make sure that you keep your head up and look for all the elements coming your way. You must go through the details and textures of the buildings and look at how they are integrated into your surroundings. As most photographers do not have this habit, you will be capturing striking images that will catch people’s attention. Even though photography in urban areas represents a unique life in a city space, street photography represents society in different spaces.
4. Use of Color
Just like you see a little guy living in a blue world, having a blue house, and sitting beside a blue window, we have become accustomed to colors. Nowadays, we have such a common habit of looking at our surroundings with color that it is difficult to look at them in any different way. As a result, one of the urban photography tips that we can give is to shoot photographs with black or white surroundings. By doing this, you will be able to see certain spaces in your photos from a different perspective.
Image taken from Strikingly User’s Website
There is a reason why many photographs in urban areas are monochromatic. However, does it mean that your photos will look better without color? Not necessarily, color and composition are two crucial elements that determine what your work is about. Therefore, you must pay attention to the color choices the same way as you do with other components. If you are doing digital photography, you can use photo editors, such as Canvas to see how your images look with and without color.
5. Choose the Right Equipment
In the guide to urban photography, you will be told about all sets of cameras and types of equipment surrounding your camerawork. Some of the photographers go for fully manual SLR cameras. On the other hand, digital photographers try to use a classic family-range compact fully. LCD screens, capturing speed, types of lens, and onboard flash are some of the important factors while choosing the right equipment for photography purposes.
Apart from that, a few technical considerations include ISO sensitivity, dynamic range, and auto-focusing. If you have a camera that doesn’t autofocus properly, it will leave you with a compilation of blurry pictures of moving objects. The choice of lens is as important as choosing the camera's body. Choosing the right kind of lenses will give lightweight and predictable results. The fewer moving parts in your photograph, the better will be the quality.
Build Photography Website on Strikingly
1. Prioritize Quality over Quantity
The best urban photographers in the world only tend to show their best work on their websites. When the visitors come to your website, you must always have the mindset of “first impression is the last impression”. If their first impression of your website is good, there is nothing better than that. If you think filling the entire website with high-quality photo blogs will work for you, you are completely wrong.
If you want to get the best out of your urban photography skill, make sure that you master content curation. By content curation, we mean that you must eradicate all the mediocre content and prioritize only the high-quality photographs and camerawork. Even if the high-quality work isn’t much, it must be displayed on your website appropriately.
2. Mobile-Friendly Design
As you may have known by now, mobile browsing has become so common that you cannot disregard the website traffic coming from it. According to Google, mobile responsiveness has become an influential factor in determining a website's search engine optimization (SEO) ranking. This alone should tell you that it is no longer about attracting audiences through desktop versions.
Image taken from Strikingly
In the guide to urban photography websites, you will be told about the importance of website traffic coming from smartphones. Therefore, you must not leave the mobile users ending up pinching and zooming on your website to go through your gallery or understand the content written on it. This is where a mobile-responsive design comes into play and without a doubt, Strikingly ticks all the boxes regarding it. We provide you with the kind of design upon which you can upload your content and it will adjust to all screen sizes, regardless of the mobile module of the user.
Conclusion
If you want to do great urban photography and integrate it on your website, there is no one better than Strikingly to help you with this. Strikingly has a user-friendly editor that helps the website owner to customize the website as per his will. Moreover, we also provide you with mobile-responsive and modern website templates. These templates enable you to great photography websites easily.
Image taken from Strikingly User’s Website
The best thing about Strikingly’s website templates is that you can easily personalize them to coincide with various industries and website content. Make sure you don’t put any limitations on your work and go through all the photography tips that we have provided to you above. Once you go through the websites of your competitors, it will be easy for you to choose the best design for your website. So, feel free and go through all the other established photography websites that we have on Strikingly and get an idea of what you should be doing to match them.
