As a street photographer, I'm often out in public, lurking in urban areas in an attempt to find interesting subjects to candidly photograph.
Building up your guts to go up to people cold is a skill I will never stop needing to work on. Occasionally when photographing someone and having it go well, they'll ask me to send them their picture. When speaking to the remarkable John Siegel on the podcast, he mentioned that he's learned to have a business card to hand out. This gives subjects some quick insight on who he is and also writes the photo number on the back of his card when he get's asked by people to share their portraits he's taken of them. Genius idea. So here I am making my own.
As someone who realizes and appreciates the importance of one condensing and conveying their brand to others, it's important to solidify and streamline what you do professionally or for hobby. The further along I get in the craft of capturing still images of unknown subjects, the more I realize documentary photography is a major part of my life, if not the primary passion of my life. Outside of my spiritual development of course. Which if you're scared off the the word "spiritual" just switch if out for "life" and call it life development. With filmmaking being the occasional side hobby that only happens periodically. I've also come to realize how much my street shooting effects my directing style in the way I work with subjects and lens a scene. Being chipper and upfront and proactive to make those I've just met and are pointing a camera at comfortable being on screen, while at the same time developing a shooting style of cinematic documenting. With a kit of specific visual cues that re-occur as one finds their style. For me, that style is psychedelically influenced hyper-saturation with beautiful bloomy optics. High contrast ratios and ethereal skies. Think conscious multidimensional art meets Makoto Shinkai. All done lite and lean to support what is hopefully always paradigm-crushing content.