Street photography runs on moments nobody schedules, which makes it hard to plan for and impossible to fake. How you think about luck shapes where you walk, how long you stay out, and whether you lift the camera when something small happens in front of you.
London was full of flags, costumes, and crowds on the morning of King Charles III's coronation on May 6, 2023. Arriving in the center of the city with plenty of ideas about what he might shoot, Mike Chudley made his first frame of a man alone on a bench, head in his hands, looking exhausted and wearing a paper party hat. Chudley doesn't know whether the hat was left over from the night before or put on for the day ahead, and he never will. That gap in the story is a big part of why the picture holds your attention. He uses it to open a longer conversation about serendipity and how accepting it changed his attitude toward going out with a camera. His comparison is live sports, where 85 minutes of a football match can point one direction and the last five can flip the result entirely.
The word itself turns out to be more useful than it first sounds. The English writer Horace Walpole coined it in a 1754 letter to a friend, borrowing from a Persian fairy tale called "The Three Princes of Serendip," with Serendip being an old name for Sri Lanka. The princes kept making discoveries "by accidents and sagacity" of things they weren't looking for. Sagacity means good judgment, or the knack of grasping what something means. Chudley splits the word into those two halves: chance, plus the wit to notice it. Accidents happen in front of everyone all day long, and only some people catch them. The second half is the one you can work on.
That split also explains a frustration you've probably felt. Chudley describes days in London with good weather, a strong location, solid gear, and plenty of coffee that produced nothing he wanted to keep. Then there are casual trips, like meeting a friend with a camera on his shoulder, that produce a keeper. His effort on those two days was nowhere near equal, and the results ran the opposite way. He puts more weight on expectations and mindset, arguing that two people can walk the same street while only one of them finds a picture. Sometimes the limit is your ability to observe what's already happening.
Psychologists have a name for what happens when that observation shuts down: inattentional blindness. In a well-known 1999 experiment at Harvard, people asked to count basketball passes in a short video were shown a person in a gorilla suit walking through the middle of the scene, and roughly half of them never saw it. Your brain filters out whatever it isn't looking for, and routine makes the filter stronger. That's why the walk to the shop or the station feels empty even though the people, the light, and the clutter on the pavement are different every single day. You can loosen that filter on purpose. Walk your usual route in the opposite direction. Go out an hour earlier or later than you normally would. Give yourself one narrow assignment for a walk, like reflections or the color yellow. A tight focus might seem like it would shrink what you see, yet it gives your attention a place to land, and once you're actively looking, the unexpected has a much better chance of registering. Chudley makes a related point about how the mundane parts of a street stay put while the details shift: a new hat on someone you pass every day, text painted on the ground, leaves on a bench that happen to form a face.
That active looking is where his practical method begins. He calls the starting point triggers, the things that reliably pull your eye, and suggests going through your Lightroom catalog to see what you photograph over and over. His list includes the color red, people in matching outfits, and gestures. He's clear that a trigger is only a reason to engage with a scene. In one New York frame, he raised his camera only because of a man's umbrella. As the man crossed in front of some light, the silhouette of his head showed through the canopy, he looked right, and Chudley took the picture. Only later did he notice that a person in the foreground was also looking right, and while editing, he spotted an arrow in the top-right corner pointing the same way.
He compares the dry spells to a pressure meter. You can walk for six hours with nothing to show for it, then make 15 pictures in five minutes around the block from your hotel, and he treats the empty hours as the buildup that makes that burst possible. He also admits to a habit he's never discussed on YouTube: he can't stop seeing the world compositionally. Waiting for a bus, he'll notice that a step to the left puts a lamppost in clean negative space against the sky, or that rising onto his toes lines up a wall with a window. He calls it daydreaming with his eyes, and he credits it with keeping him more grounded and aware of what's in front of him.
His favorite picture from a California road trip earlier this year makes the same case. After days of mountains, snow, desert, and San Francisco, he made it from the passenger seat, heading back to the hotel at blue hour: traffic lights against the evening sky, with a Walgreens behind them. His camera had been off for most of the drive. You can choose where you go to take pictures, he says, but not what you'll find there, so his suggestion is to take a street you usually skip and walk a little farther than usual.
The New York umbrella frame is worth pausing the video on, because once you know where the arrow is, you can't stop seeing it.
Alex Cooke is a Cleveland-based photographer and meteorologist. He teaches music and enjoys time with horses and his rescue dogs.
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