Photographing light and shadow on the street

Mid-October. The sun takes its time getting above the rooftops and stays low all day. Suddenly, long shadows stretch across the pavement, and a building you walked straight past in July is ablaze at four in the afternoon.

For me, this is one of the loveliest times of year. Light and shadow do much of the work for you in street photography, especially in autumn. You just have to notice them.

Why autumn works so well

In summer, the sun is high for most of the day. Light falls from above, shadows are short and eyes disappear into the shade beneath eyebrows and caps. The good light comes at the beginning and end of the day. You have to get up early or stay out late for it.

In autumn, that changes. The sun doesn’t rise as high, so the low light lasts longer. The light that skims across surfaces at nine in the evening in June arrives by mid-afternoon in October. The light is warmer, the shadows are longer and the contrast between sun and shade is greater.

If you have time to take photos during the day, that’s a gift. You no longer have to wait for the golden hour. It pretty much lasts all afternoon.

First the light, then the subject

Most people look for a subject on the street. An eye-catching coat, someone doing something odd. I often find it works better the other way round: find the light first, then see who ends up in it.

It sounds like a small difference, but it changes how you walk through a place. You start by looking at walls, pavements and corners where the sun just manages to slip between two buildings. Only once you’ve found a spot like that do you think about who’s walking past.

It’s the same idea as with composition: first the setting, then the main character. I wrote about this in more detail in my article on composition in street photography. Light is simply part of that setting. Often the most important part.

Where is the light coming from?

Once you’ve found a spot, it helps to take a moment to see which direction the light is coming from. It makes more difference than you might think.

Light from the front, with the sun behind you, is the easiest to work with. You can see everything clearly, but it can soon look flat. Light from the side gives depth. Faces and buildings have a light side and a dark side, and long shadows run diagonally through your frame. For me, that’s often the most interesting light on the street.

Light from behind your subject, or backlighting, is the trickiest and the most dramatic. I’ll come back to that.

Patches of light and waiting

A patch of light is a bit of street that catches the sun while everything around it stays in shade. Between two tall buildings, under a railway bridge, at the end of an alley. Sometimes it’s no bigger than a few paving slabs.

Stand opposite it with your shot framed. Then wait for someone to step into it. That might take a minute. Or a quarter of an hour, by which time the light has shifted quite a bit.

At first, waiting feels like doing nothing. I think this is when street photography is most like fishing. You know where something might happen, just not when. There’s a reason waiting is among the street photography tips it took me years to learn.

With a fixed focal length, you know exactly what fits in your frame, so you know where to stand to frame that patch of light well. You can read about suitable lenses in which camera and lens to choose for street photography.

Waiting has a practical advantage too: you can set everything up beforehand. Use zone focusing to focus on the spot where someone will stand in the light, and choose a shutter speed of 1/250 or faster. When someone steps into that patch, all you have to do is press the shutter.

Exposing for the highlights

This is where the technical side often goes wrong. Your camera sees lots of dark shadow and a small area of bright light. It tries to average everything out into a neatly exposed photo. The result: grey shadows and a blown-out face.

So turn your exposure compensation down. Minus 1 stop is often a good starting point; in very harsh light, you may need minus 2. That keeps the person in the patch of light properly exposed and makes the surrounding shadows truly black.

That black isn’t a mistake. It’s your frame. Everything that doesn’t matter disappears into it.

After a few photos, check that the highlights aren’t blowing out. Your histogram is more useful than your eyes here, especially outside in the sun. Your screen can easily fool you in those conditions. There’s more on shutter speed, aperture and ISO in the best settings for street photography.

Silhouettes against the light

Shoot straight into the low sun and you get silhouettes. People become black shapes against a bright background. You can no longer see a face, just a posture or a hand holding a bag.

This works best when the shape is clear. Someone walking apart from others, a face in profile, a cyclist. As soon as two silhouettes overlap, they become a blob.

Pay attention to what’s behind your silhouette too. A bright sky, a sunlit building or a square in sunshine works well. Against a busy, dimly lit background, your black shape gets lost. Here too, turning down the exposure compensation helps stop the background blowing out and makes the shape truly black.

An added benefit: someone in silhouette usually isn’t recognisable. That’s worth considering if you’re unsure whether you’re allowed to photograph people on the street. It also makes getting started a little easier if you still feel awkward. I wrote about that hurdle in feeling nervous about taking photos on the street.

Shadow patterns

Low light casts long shadows. From fences, trees, lamp posts and the edges of buildings. Patterns appear on a pavement or a wall that will be gone an hour later.

A fence casting stripes across the pavement is almost a photo in itself. Someone walking through those stripes makes it a street photo. The approach is the same as with a patch of light: find the pattern first, then wait.

Look up and to the side too. The shadow of tree branches on a white wall. A cyclist with a shadow three times their own length. Sometimes the shadow is more interesting than the person casting it.

There’s no rule against harsh midday sun

You often hear that it’s best not to take photos in the middle of the day. Too bright, ugly shadows under the eyes. That might be true for a portrait. On the street, I think it’s nonsense.

Harsh light gives you strong contrasts, which you can use to make graphic photos. Deep blacks next to bright areas. That can work particularly well in black and white.

What does change is that shadows get shorter and fall more directly downwards. Look for covered areas, awnings and narrow streets where light and dark meet with a sharp edge. Or a brightly lit wall with a dark street in front of it, like the photo at the top.

Soft light on cloudy days

Not every day is an autumn day with low sunlight. This is the Netherlands. For much of the year, it’s just grey.

You can work with that too. Light on an overcast day is soft and even. There are no harsh shadows and you can see faces clearly. That’s welcome when your photos are about people and their expressions.

You do lose the drama of harsh light. It has to come from somewhere else, from a gesture or the moment itself. And when it starts raining, things get really interesting. There’s more about that in my article on taking photos in the rain.

The colour of light

Low sunlight is warm, almost orange. Shadows, on the other hand, are cool and slightly blue, because the only light reaching them comes from the sky. You can see that difference very clearly in colour, especially in autumn.

That makes a person in warm light naturally stand out against a bluish shadow. You don’t have to correct all those colours when editing. The warmth and coolness side by side show what an autumn afternoon like that actually looks like.

Reflections

Light bounces. Off shop windows, wet pavements, puddles and glass façades. Sometimes that brings light into an unexpected patch of shade, or lets you see the street twice in one frame.

You can use reflections to build layers: someone behind a window, the street reflected in the glass in front of them. It’s a puzzle, and it often doesn’t work. But when it does, you get a photo you don’t understand at a glance. I usually take that as a good sign.

Learning to see light

The tricky thing about light is how easily you overlook it. You see the people, the shops, the bustle. The light is just there. I think it mostly takes practice: going out a few times with just one question in mind. Where is the light falling?

On the street photography workshop in Utrecht, we read the light along the Oudegracht. I explain things as we walk, in a group of no more than five participants. You’ll find all the cities and dates on the street photography workshops page.

If you want to explore a city entirely through light and shadow, London is a good candidate. On the London masterclass, we walk through the Barbican among other places, where the shadows shift throughout the day. You can come back an hour later and find a completely different photo. The masterclass is part of REFRESH, two days of street photography in London or Paris.

One last tip for anyone who wants to head straight outside: over the next few weeks, go out around four in the afternoon and look only at where the sun still reaches. If you’d like some help with that, have a look at the workshops or ask me a question first.