Environmental Street Portrait – Timothy H.

Recently, I shot my first environmental street portrait. It was fun. The thing is, my original plan was to get an architectural street photo. Sometimes, you just have to grab opportunities when they present themselves. Embrace the unexpected and sometimes you get rewarded.

Both environmental street portraits and architectural street photos are amalgams of two separate and different genres of photography. They’re a blend of styles. In case, you’re not familiar with these four types of photos bear with me for a brief description of each.

Environmental Portraits

With environmental portraits, you pose people in their normal environment. Typically, this is at work or home. It is a way of presenting and defining a person in relation to their normal environment; where they work or live. Their environment is part of their story and helps bring out their story in ways a standard studio portrait cannot.

Street Portraits

These portraits are also posed but the subjects are not models.  Street portraits are of strangers you approach in the street and ask to take their photo. The subjects agree to pose for you but unlike studio shots there is not a lot of setup and preparation. Although posed, they are very candid in nature. These types of portrait can be considered a sub-genre of street photography. However, the subjects are not posed in street photography and usually they don’t know that you are taking their picture.

Environmental Street Portraits

So, by combining the elements of these two styles you get a Environmental Street Portrait. In this case, I caught Tim, who I did not know, at work in his normal work environment. I had my camera set up for an architectural type shot and used that when he agreed to let me take a few quick portrait shots.

Architectural Photos

Architectural photos are of buildings and other man-made structures. The subject can be the entire building, or just a detail. It can be an interior or exterior shot. It can also include cityscape scenes.

Street Photography

This is taking candid photos of people in public spaces just going about their everyday life. Most of the time the subjects are not aware they are being photographed.

Architectural Street Photography

Again, this is a combination of two different styles. I set up my camera to capture the distinctive TC Energy Center framed within the columns of the Jesse H. Jones Hall for the Performing Arts (commonly known as Jones Hall). My intent was to capture the building including candid scenes of people as they passed by my camera.

Given the significance of the architecture in this portrait I guess I could classify it as an “architectural environmental street portrait” but that doesn’t really roll off the tongue well. Besides, there’s no point in being greedy in genre blending. So, enough of the definitions let’s get to the shot.

The Story

Having scouted the location, I got there and setup my tripod and camera. Using a tripod is not customary for street photography. However, it is normal for architectural shots. In this case I didn’t have much choice as the framing was tight to get the building within the column opening. Trying this handheld while hoping to get candid shots of people passing by would be very difficult. So, with everything set and I waited for people to pass by. And waited. And waited. Houston is a city of 2.3 million people (nearly 7 million in metropolitan Houston). Where was everybody?

About that time Tim came by. Tim works security at Jones Hall. He seemed like a friendly guy so I half-jokingly asked him where everyone was. He readily admitted that weren’t all that many people around during the day. Thinking back on it, I guess this makes sense. This was the Theater District rather than a retail area or the central business district. No doubt Covid still has an impact. Also, you can’t forget that like many other cities in hotter portions of the country that are without a large mass transit presence, people to drive to work in their air-conditioned cars.  Consequently, they park in the building’s garage and tend to stay in their air-conditioned building all day until they drive home. Not a great situation for street photography to say the least.

The Surprise

However, this little exchange got us talking. It turns out Tim is also a photographer. By photographer, I don’t mean someone who uses an iPhone to take selfies and pictures of their food. I mean someone who uses a DSLR and understands aperture, shutter speed and ISO. It was refreshing and encouraging to talk with someone in a younger generation who appreciates and understands the basics of photography. Tim has at one time published an online magazine for Houston nightlife and worked as a wedding photographer. He showed me some of his photos and he is quite good.

Somewhere in all of this discussion, I asked Tim if he would let me take his photograph. He agreed and I’m very glad he did. It’s a great reminder of how a chance encounter with a stranger turned into a memorable experience. It turned out to be such a great experience that I think I’ll be trying an environmental street portrait again.

The Shot

As I mentioned earlier, I used my setup for the architectural aspect to get this shot which included using a tripod. I was positioned downhill and less than a block away from the 56-story TC Energy Center. This necessitated using a 14mm ultra wide-angle lens pointed upwards at a significant angle to get it all in. As a result, I had to deal with both wide-angle distortion and perspective distortion in post-processing. Fortunately, Photoshop’s Free Transform/Warp tool was up to the task.

Using this ultra wide-angle lens also required Tim to be positioned just a couple of feet in front of the camera. Otherwise, he would have been lost in the background. I also had to battle a large dynamic range from bright light in the background to shadows where Tim was. It was challenging. That’s what made it fun.

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