While I may never get comfortable taking close-up street candids, much as I love great work in that spirit, I do like taking shots of people in public where they’re far away but still doing something perceptible, with an embedded sense of narrative.
It’s the kind of thing that city life is all about: seeing crowds from high up, seeing crowds way up ahead. Watching joggers on a path from across a bridge, watching people across the way in a park. I once saw a critique of photography of street-level strangers that was taken from a position above the street on the grounds that it mimicked surveillance imagery, that it embodied power. In the sense that all city life has involved surveillance of strangers even before there were cameras, yes. I understand the point, but one of the great visual pleasures of a city is the constant cycling between the neighborhood full of familiar not-quite-strangers and the vast multitudes of people going about their business.
In this case, taking wedding photos—you see that a lot at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, along with hundreds of tourists doing the Rocky run up the stairs (that would be a fun series of shots-from-a-distance, actually). I just liked the smallness of the people alongside the scale of the pillars when seen this far back.