Is There Such a Thing as Bad Light in Street Photography?

Golden hour and blue hour can make almost any street corner look like a finished photograph, and that polish can hide whether anything is actually happening in the frame. If most of your keepers come from warm evening light or city glow after sunset, the gray months ahead are a good test of what you can find without that help.

Pretty light can make you stop looking. Peter Forsgård calls good light "a sedative for your visual instincts" and a compositional crutch, because when the light does the work, you stop asking the questions that make a street photograph hold up. Is there a juxtaposition? A gesture? Motion? Anything at all besides the glow? He is careful to keep the argument inside street photography. In landscape work, he agrees, light is often the subject, and reading it well is the whole job. On the street, he sees it differently, and he argues that the images you make in flat light belong to you in a way that a lucky sunset never quite does.

His case for overcast skies centers on what they take away. There are no deep shadows to swallow a messy corner of the frame and no rim light to peel a subject off a busy background. Everything sits in plain view, so the frame either has a story or it doesn't, and your composition has to carry it. Forsgård calls flat light "the great revealer," and he pushes even further into weather most people avoid. Rain brings reflections, umbrellas, and people tucked under awnings, and people move and react differently when they're trying to stay dry. As far as he's concerned, coming home because "the light was bad" is a sign you weren't seeing the moments in front of you.

Flat light is the normal condition for much of the year in a lot of places. In Helsinki, where Forsgård shoots, the shortest days of December bring only about six hours between sunrise and sunset, and the sun rarely climbs high enough to do much even then. If you live somewhere similar, waiting for good light can mean barely shooting from November to March. Overcast skies also behave like a huge diffuser, which brings some practical advantages. Exposure changes far less from sidewalk to doorway, so you can set your camera manually and rarely touch it, leaving your attention on people. Colors often look richer without harsh glare washing them out, so a red coat or a yellow umbrella can do the job a shaft of sunlight would normally do. The one thing that tends to trip people up is the sky itself, which usually renders as a featureless white slab, so tilting down, shooting against walls, or using shopfronts as a backdrop keeps the frame from losing its top third.

Forsgård also takes aim at a very familiar kind of street photo: someone walking through a pocket of light, or a long shadow stretching across the pavement. He finds most of these empty and asks "so what?" of nearly every one. The internet is full of them, he says, which is part of why flat light can set your work apart now. He isn't against sunshine. If a juxtaposition or a telling gesture happens inside a beam of light, he says to go ahead and take it. He even points to a spot in Helsinki's railway station where low autumn sun pours through the big windows, as an example of a place worth knowing. His objection is to light standing in for a story that isn't there. From there, he connects it all to constraints, which he treats as the quickest way to grow, whether that means one camera and one lens or deliberately heading out when the forecast looks gray.

Forsgård's bonus point, on trading the hunter's mindset for a receiver's, is in the video above.