Beautiful scenes and pure moments always happen suddenly and quickly. Martin Waltz says about hunting these moments, From the truth of street photography.

Martin U Waltz is a professional photographer from Berlin and the founder of the urban photography group berlin1020.

Besides photography, he also writes and teaches. The following article is quoted from him, which deals with teaching urban genre photography and how to see its subjects.

Most of my street photos are wrong; Distant subjects, blurred backgrounds, out-of-frame subjects, inappropriate selections, or technical glitches.

Murphy’s law of street photography: “Does street photography go bad? Yes, most likely.”

Work and life as usual. Editing a sea of ​​bad photos can be exhausting. But most street photographers constantly repeat the “99-95% failure experience”. To be honest, I have nothing to console. 95-99% of the time, my photos are ruined, but I have come to terms with it. I have learned to reach a truce with my ruined photos at the end of each day. When I am at home, I look at them one by one and say to myself:

• Why did I want to take this photo?
• Why didn’t it come out right?
• What should I do next time?

This is how bad photos become good learning opportunities. I listen carefully to the bad pictures; I delete them without any past regrets or conflicts. I will get better next time I go to the street. Of course, I hope so.

The photos I gave them tell a different story. I have a hard time coming to terms with these photos. I missed them because I was too slow, wasn’t focused, was overthinking, or whatever, the moment didn’t allow me to take a picture.

A picture I didn’t take is a missed opportunity. I will not have a work sample. The lost photo has nothing to teach. He does not even have a memory of that situation. That moment is gone. That’s the whole story.

A lousy photo has at least something to teach, but what if he didn’t take a picture?

These days I set the camera settings to speed. I put everything else like exposure, ISO, and focus, to auto. I even put myself on automatic mode: I start taking pictures whenever I see something interesting. As long as the scene continues to be interesting, I will also take pictures! Photo, photo, photo…

Exploring and editing photos remain at home for later. The ones I have been able to get. Sometimes the story is just this:

“Either you took a quick picture or nothing.”

Of course, I like to take pictures cheerfully and carefully. But sometimes the subjects don’t wait for you, like this torrential downpour that surprised my wife and me while we were out for dinner. Only one minute and 11 seconds passed between this article’s first and last photo.

And then, it was all over. People had left the street, and the barrage had stopped. There was no photo left to take. The scene was over.

Apart from some beautiful street photos, these photos inspired the creation of a collection called “Light, City, Rain.” Therefore, in my opinion, the story is like this:

When in doubt, shoot fast… fast or nothing!

The light of the city of Baran