As a street photographer you should always have your camera ready to shoot. This is probably one of the major recommendations made in books and blogs on street photography. When I went to the Bavarian capital Munich a couple of months back, I started to fully understand what this advice means. Some moments and situations are extremely ephemeral and fugitive that you would miss them if it wasn’t for having the camera always on. During the late morning, I was walking through the city center – not far from the town hall – and the city was starting to get really crowded. As I wrote in one of my earlier posts, crowds are usually good for street photography. On the downside, however, is that you need to be extremely alert and attentive to scrutinize the environment for potential shots.

And then there was this man crossing the street barefooted. It was a blink of a moment and I was just trying to get another person in the frame with shoes. At the end – once I looked at the picture in a café later on – the picture worked out just fine. This was fortunate, because I did not have so many pictures of the same situation to choose from.