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The received wisdom of street photography is that your subject has to be front on.
Want your subject to connect with the viewer? You need to see their eyes. It's how we interact with our fellow humans, reading the emotions and intent on their faces.
Well, like all good rules, this is one that's made to be broken.
In early 2024, I headed to the Canary Islands for 10 days for some winter sun, including several days on Tenerife and La Palma.
March in the Canaries was much warmer than the dying days of an English winter but definitely still in the sleepy end of their tourist season. There was plenty to explore, and a minimum of packed crowds to push through to do it.
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La Palma's capital Santa Cruz de La Palma is a pint-sized harbour capital of about 20,000 people; first founded in the 15th Century, it has endured everything from pirate sackings to agricultural collapse, and always managed to cling on. You can walk right around its compact centre in under an hour, the roaring Atlantic crashing against the shore.
Santa Cruz de La Palma's streets are not London's Oxford Street, nor New York's Fifth Avenue, but a street is a street, and even the smallest can present you with a photo opportunity if you have your eyes open.
These nuns appeared in a street not too far from the city's beach, almost hidden under their tunics and habits. They moved slowly and steadily towards a door, knocked on it – and the door opened. The woman answering it was perfectly framed to their left, a quizzical expression on her face.
I had just enough time to rattle off a shot on the camera in my hand – a Ricoh FF-700, a chunky compact camera from the mid-1980s. The Ricoh has a giant LCD screen that takes up virtually all of its top plate and has a decidedly grunty film advance. It also has a superb f/2.8 lens, and I've found it a fantastic camera for street photography.
Street photography purists might baulk at having a camera like this – we're told that ultra-quiet rangefinders are the best tool, because they don't signal that we're taking a photo and the subjects remain natural.
When your subject has their back turned on the other side of the street, however, it doesn't really matter.