9 Street Photography Tips You Should Probably Know
After doing photography for many years, I still find street photography to be the form I connect the most with.
Because of it’s candid nature, I find myself noticing and paying attention to the many little moments that happen in the world around me.
And contrary to what some believe about photography, I enjoy the side of photography that is not staged, that is natural, and that is real.
Whenever I take a decent street photograph, me or someone else can look at it later and feel as if they are peering into that world and are a part of it, at least for a moment.
It also allows others to catch a glimpse of what I see, what I’ve seen, and the places I’ve been.
This connection between me and the world, along with the connection between me and the viewer, creates for a beautiful melody.
Today I’m going to share with you 9 street photography tips you should know to help you improve your street photography.
And even if you don’t agree with everything I say, just take what you find useful.
Let’s get started.
Move Your Feet
An issue I see many beginner street photographers have is not moving their feet.
It’s a common crutch in photography, especially if you’re used to zoom lenses.
Although zoom lenses are great, they allow the flexibility of multiple focal lengths, they can also hold you back in street photography.
When you have the ability to take photos from anywhere, you are less incentivized to move your feet.
And thus you’d rather zoom in to 55mm than take a few steps and catch it with 35mm.
Whereas if you just had a prime lens, you’d have no choice but to move your feet.
This principle is very important in street photography because it not only affects your angles and perspectives, but also the compression of your image.
If you ever feel like your photos don’t look or feel “right”, it may be because of this.
Your compression or depth of field is off, and therefore your photo is off.
It’s the same reason why a shot taken with 55mm and a shot taken with 35mm but cropped in to 55mm looks different.
I myself used to struggle with this a lot, but it’s a bad habit you got to get rid of.
Don’t zoom in, move your feet.
As the late Robert Capa once said:
“If your photographs aren’t good enough, you aren’t close enough.”
Work with what you have.
Sometimes you’ll hear photographers say:
“I don’t live anywhere exciting enough to take great street photos.”
Or “I don’t have the right camera to do street photography.”
And it’s true, for sure, if you’re in the environments like New York, you’d probably get better street photos.
And yeah, maybe if you had a smaller and wider aperture lens your street photos would be better.
But at the end of the day, many of us don’t.
And if you live in some random suburb in the middle of nowhere, you gotta work with what you have.
The first step is understanding: there are advantages to wherever you are.
Street photography doesn’t have to be big cities and skyscrapers.
It could be about any and everything that goes on in your everyday life.
If you go out and take photos regardless, you’ll soon realize that it’s hard to even capture 1% of your “boring little city”.
A city, no matter where you live, has a lot of stuff going on.
And even capturing just 1% of your world would result in some amazing photographs.
Furthermore, complaining about what you don’t have access to isn’t going to help you improve.
This also applies to gear.
A lot of photographers complain about having cheap cameras or mediocre lenses, but the fact of the matter is, everything we have nowadays is still better than the stuff they had a century ago.
The little smart phone you’re watching this on has a better camera than many of the old cameras your favorite photographers used in the past.
That didn’t stop them.
So maybe you don’t have the best camera or you don’t live in New York or Tokyo.
Just work with what you have.
Follow Your Eye.
When it comes to photography, what you see and how you translate that into a photo is pivotal.
And the skill most people want to pick up in street photography is to “train their eye”.
I want to share with you an alternate perspective.
You can train your eye, yes, but I would first encourage you to learn how to follow your eye.
You see, already, around you, even as you watch this video, there are an infinite amount of photographs happening.
Look outside the window if you’re in a room.
Look around if you’re in a coffee shop.
Open your eyes and you’ll see.
And instead of trying to create moments, learn to observe moments that are already happening.
Instead of trying to train your eye, first learn to follow your eye.
You’ll quickly realize that we are naturally drawn to observing interesting things around us.
It could be some cool motorcycles near the coastline.
It could be someone taking a photo of a famous intersection.
It could be people laughing and having fun.
Your eyes already see these things.
The skill of photography is simply capturing it.
If you can capture even a small percentage of what your eye already sees, you’d be the best street photographer on the planet.
So don’t train your eye yet - follow what you already see.
The real world has an infinite amount of interesting stuff.
You just need to look.
Blocking
A useful, more practical compositional tip is to “block”.
Whenever you’re out in the world, look for things you can use to frame your subjects.
This could be walls, buildings, plants, or trees.
Include these objects in the same frame as your subject and you’ll notice something interesting.
Your photos will start to have more of a depth to them, because there’s more stuff in between you and your subject.
Plus there’s also a sense of your subject interacting with the environment, not just simply walking.
That’s important for street photography because often what we want to capture is a person’s relationship to the world around them.
I still struggle to do this, but finding ways to showcase this relationship between humans and the world they’ve built is what I find compelling about the genre.
You can also frame your subject off with the walls around them.
Windows, doors, archways, are all easy ways to circle your subject.
Doing this can have a visual effect of drawing your viewers eyes to the subject, much like leading lines.
It can also add, again: context and a sense of uniformity.
Play around with blocking and framing - there’s a infinite amount of compositions you can use to add that extra element to your photos.
Try constraining yourself to a prime lens.
I’ve got nothing against zoom lenses, they’re great.
Being able to shoot in a variety of focal lengths can be really convenient.
And if you’re lucky and have a fixed aperture one, it could be like having 5 primes in one.
The issue however comes when there’s too much happening.
If you’re out taking photos with a zoom you can find it confusing.
You’ll see a shot and think to yourself:
“Okay…for this shot I’ll do a 35mm, or wait maybe it’ll look better at 23…now I gotta walk closer, and then…”
And then the shot’s gone.
You missed it.
You see, I prefer to keep my street photography simple.
Which usually means one body and one prime lens.
This way I don’t have to decide between focal lengths, this is all I’ve got.
And then I can spend more of my mental energy on getting the right shot instead of picking the right shot.
Of course as you understand depth of field more and more, deciding between which focal length becomes easier and easier.
But I find that it’s still a bit of a headache, and I prefer to lighten the load, and keep it simple.
Futhermore, constraining yourself to a prime lens will teach you much about that focal length.
You’ll soon be able to understand it’s range, it’s capabilities, and what you have to do to get a good shot.
This is harder to understand with a zoom because what you can and can’t do is all mixed up.
So although zoom lenses are great, they’re also confusing.
When it comes to street photography, I’d recommend to take your favorite focal length and just shoot with that.
You’ll quickly notice that thinking in one focal length, not five, is much more manageable.
Too many lenses and focal lengths often make me second guess what I should be using.
When I should just be focused on taking photos.
It’s not just people.
Street photography isn’t just about people.
It could be about things.
Heck it could even be about light or color itself.
Find whatever you find interesting and take a picture of it.
Often some of my favorite photos are just random perspectives of random houses and streets in daily life.
I find something appealing about the shapes or the light that hits and I just try to capture that.
Even here for example are a few shots of stuff I took in Japan.
There’s few people here, there’s nothing crazy exciting happening, but I thought it was neat so I took the picture.
And sometimes a photo without people can be more telling than one with people.
So don’t just look for crowds and people to photograph.
Try and observe what’s special about all these other little things.
I think if you can do that well you’ll have a stronger foundation when you do try to capture people because then you can do the same, just with a more animate subject.
Fishing
Fishing is a very easy and effective street photography technique.
The idea is: instead of trying be in the right place at the right time all the time, just find the right place first.
Then, sit there and “fish”, waiting for the right subjects or elements to enter the frame on their own.
This may sound contrary to what I said earlier about moving your feet, but they’re both important just for different situations.
Moving your feet is important to getting the right shot and compression.
But sometimes we’ll find ourselves in situations where we’re in the right shot, but we’re missing something, a subject or something interesting to walk through to make the photo even better.
An example of this is this shot I took here:
I was walking around in Osaka one golden hour and saw the buildings, the river, and the sunset all blend, making for a pretty picture.
I took a few shots but also thought to myself:
“This might look better if it had a person in it.”
So I stopped walking and fished, waiting for someone to pass by.
And then I took this shot of this boy riding his bike through the sunset.
I think both images, with and without the boy are nice for different reasons.
Plus, sometimes you’ll get lucky.
Here’s another shot I took one morning down the streets of Tokyo.
I was still jetlagged from my flight so I was waking up early.
But for many of the people there had a long night of drinking, had missed the last train, and were just now going home.
As I explored the aftermath, I saw some cool looking streets.
I was fully expecting to just get this perspective shot, because it caught my eye.
But the very moment I pressed the shutter, a girl jumped out and entered the frame.
She was laughing, probably to a friend, but it ended up making the shot pretty cool.
So sometimes you can fish intentionally, sometimes it’s a happy accident.
But you can see how easy it is to just slow down, wait a little bit, be patient, and allow certain moments to unfold on their own.
That’s fishing.
Your Street Photography
The sooner you can find your version of street photography, the better.
We mentioned earlier that street photography doesn’t have to be edgy expressions, skyscrapers, and big cities.
And actually, many of my photos aren’t.
Often I like simple perspectives and the quiet scenery of daily life.
Some of these don’t even look like “street photos”, but I still consider them such.
This is because they carry the same essence of street photography: the “candid” element.
And maybe you’d just call that “candid” photography.
But then by that definition you’d just call it “photography”.
So who knows?
The point is to find the side of the coin that your street photography is on and emphasize on that.
You don’t need to get into people’s faces and flash away like Bruce Gilden, unless you want to of course.
There are many foils to street photography and you don’t need to get caught up in or worry so much about how you label your photography.
Because at the end of the day, if you’re on a street, you’re on a street.
Take the picture.
There are Opportunities Everywhere
Once you have a grasp on what your street photography is, your job is to now recognize and take advantage of these opportunities.
You see, as you build up a decent bit of experience, you’ll get a greater sense of what each shot requires.
What looks like a good opportunity for a photo and what you’ll have to do to get it.
And the more you shrink the gap between recognizing an opportunity and capitalizing on it, the more better photos you get.
From here, just learn to recognize these opportunities and capture them.
“Oh this is a great chance for a 35mm shot with the blah blah blah”
Or maybe, “This person’s walking this way, this could make for a nice photo.”
Or “Nice, the lighting’s perfect, this is my chance to line things up in this way.”
And then you continue to make use and take advantage of these opportunities.
Getting better at street photography is simply just recognizing more opportunities and actually being able to captizalize on them.
The better you get at those things, the better your photos will get, the better photographer you’ll become.
Bonus
The final street photography tip I have for you is a bonus.
If there’s anything to remember from this letter, it’s this one.
You see, a big problem about the photography community is that ironically, many of the people in it aren’t taking many photos.
They watch too many tutorials, consume too much content, and never do anything about it.
They argue on forums about which thing is better and why their opinion matters.
And they wonder why they’re not getting better.
So the best tip I can give you is really simple:
Get your ass up, go outside, and take more photos.
By now you have more than enough information and knowledge about street photography.
And even trying to master just one of these tips can take a lifetime.
I myself am still working on all of them.
So you don’t need more knowledge, you need more action.
You don’t need more knowledge, you need more experience.
Most of you guys already know what you need to be doing, you’re just not doing it.
And the greatest street photography tip I can give you is that:
You’re ready.
You’re ready to go out into the world, take some awesome photos, and live life or whatever.
And anything you don’t have you’ll learn on the field.
Good luck.
If you made it this far - big thank you.
You can learn more about building a solid foundation with photography, in Photography Essentials - it’s free.
You can also support me by adding to the travel fund on my website or grabbing a copy of my latest zine “The Sinking Sun”.
Thanks again for reading, have a great day.
