Stop Photographing The Obvious: One-to-One Street Photography Tutorial With Me

This Isn’t Just Another Street Photography Workshop

Let me be clear at the outset.

I’m not going to spend a day teaching you how to photograph people walking down the street.

You already know how to do that.

What I want to show you is how to see the things other people walk straight past. I want to show you what street photography really is.

I offer one-to-one, day-long street photography tutorials in Weston-super-Mare and Bristol, and, subject to my availability, London.

The idea is simple.

We spend a day together on the streets, cameras in hand, looking for the funny, the strange, the awkward, the unexpected and the downright ridiculous moments that are happening all around us.

Because for me, that’s what street photography is about.

Not the obvious.

Not the bloke with the interesting hat.

Not the attractive girl just walking along the street.

Not photographing the same bloody thing that another fifty photographers have already photographed.

I want to help you see what happens when you start looking properly.

Learn to see, not just photograph

My photography is based around what I call humorous snapshot street photography.

It’s instinctive. It’s observational. It’s often messy. It doesn’t necessarily follow the rules of conventional photography.

Sometimes the photograph is technically imperfect.

Sometimes the composition is completely wonky.

Sometimes you have half a second to react.

And sometimes the best picture is the one you nearly walked straight past.

I’ll show you how I look for those moments; how I position myself, how I anticipate what might happen, how I use backgrounds and colour, how I recognise potential pictures and, perhaps most importantly, when to actually press the shutter and when not to.

But I won’t be trying to turn you into me.

I’d much rather help you discover what makes you see differently from everyone else.

Stop looking for photographs

One of the biggest things I’ll encourage you to do is stop walking around desperately looking for a photograph.

Instead, start paying attention.

Look at what’s happening around you.

Look at the relationships between people and their surroundings.

Look for contradictions.

Look for visual jokes.

Look for coincidence.

Look at what’s happening in the background.

Look where nobody else appears to be looking.

Because the best street photographs aren’t always the ones you went looking for.

They’re the ones that suddenly happen in front of you.

And if you’re ready, you press the button.

A day on the streets

This isn’t a classroom-based carefully constructed photography course.

It’s not an impersonal online video course.

There won’t be a PowerPoint presentation.

There won’t be three hours of me explaining aperture, shutter speed and ISO while you slowly die inside.

We’ll be outside. Walking. Looking. Waiting. Shooting.

Talking about photographs. Talking about all things street photography. And you asking me anything you want to know.

We’ll probably be laughing at some of the ridiculous things we encounter. In fact, we’ll chat a lot. It’ll definitely be fun and informal.

We’ll review images as we go and I’ll give you honest, practical feedback about what is working, what isn’t and — perhaps more importantly — why.

You can bring whatever camera you normally use. You don’t need the latest Leica, a £4,000 lens or a bag full of equipment.

In fact, I’d rather you brought something small and simple, but importantly a digital camera so we can review what you’ve taken. I’d ask suggest you have a lens that is no longer than 50mm (and ideally 28mm or 35mm) – after all we’re street photographers getting inside a scene not voyeurs on the outside zooming in.

But, the camera isn’t the important bit.

Your eyes are.

So, Why Me?

Because I’ve put in the hard yards.

I’ve been shooting street photography for more than 20 years. Not for a few months or a couple of years. Not because street photography suddenly became fashionable on Instagram. I’ve spent two decades walking streets, watching people, missing photographs, getting photographs, being challenged, getting things wrong and slowly working out what it is that makes a picture work for me.

Along the way, the work has received some pretty significant recognition.

I was a winner of PDN Street 2016, amongst many other awards (click here to see a full list), and my photography has been praised by people including renowned street photography writer and curator Colin Westerbeck and the legendary Magnum photographer Martin Parr.

I’ve also exhibited and been published internationally and have supplied photography to Getty Images since 2009.

But awards and names on a website only tell you so much.

The important thing is that I’ve actually done the work.

I’ve spent thousands of hours on the street learning to anticipate moments, recognise the ridiculous, spot connections between completely unrelated things and react quickly enough to make the photograph before it disappears.

There is no shortcut to that.

You can’t learn it from an Instagram reel. You can’t buy it with a new camera. And you certainly can’t learn it by memorising a list of street photography rules.

You have to put the hours in.

That’s what I’m offering you: not a theoretical photography course, but the benefit of more than two decades of experience of actually going out there and doing it.

I’ll show you what I look for, how I think, how I react and, perhaps most importantly, how I try to see photographs where other people don’t.

You don’t need to photograph like me.

But after a day together, hopefully you’ll start seeing a little more like a real street photographer.

Weston-super-Mare • Bristol • London

I normally run tutorials in Weston-super-Mare (where I’ve been based since 2021)or Bristol, depending on what you’re looking for and where we think will give us the best opportunities.

I also offer them in London, subject to my availability, when I go back to the old hometown.

Each place has something different to offer.

Weston has the wonderfully odd character of a British seaside town. Bristol gives us a brilliant mixture of people, architecture, colour and urban chaos. London is, well, London — you could probably spend a lifetime photographing it and still barely scratch the surface.

But wherever we are, the objective remains the same:

Stop photographing what everyone else is photographing.

Start finding your own pictures.

Who is this for?

You might be a complete beginner.

You might have been shooting street photography for years.

You might have a hard drive full of photographs but still feel like you’re not quite getting the pictures you imagined.

Or perhaps you’ve simply reached the point where you’re bored of taking photographs that look like everyone else’s.

That’s where I can help.

I’m not going to give you a list of rules and tell you that this is the correct way to shoot street photography. (OK, so I may have a few opinions here!)

There isn’t one.

I’ll show you my way of seeing, and hopefully that will encourage you to start developing yours.

One-to-one. One day. £125.

The tutorial is £125 for the day. Usually from 10:00 – 17:00 (with an hour’s break for lunch).

They’re usually held on a Saturday and are completely one-to-one, so the day is focused entirely on you, your photography and what you want to get from it.

No corporate photography-speak.

No bullshit.

No promise that I’ll magically turn you into a street photography genius in six hours or so.

Just a day on the streets, camera in hand, learning to look harder, react quicker and stop photographing the obvious. I’ll even given give you a free copy of my zine: Greatest Hits Vol.1 (whilst stocks last!)

Because there’s a whole world of photographs happening around you.

You just have to learn how to see them.

So get in touch if you’d like to spend a day shooting with me, by completing the contact form below.

Contact Me

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