Street photography tips: 15 lessons I took years to learn
Nijmegen is where I first pointed a camera at the street. By now, I know the city centre like the back of my hand. Yet I don't think I'll ever tire of looking at it. That says quite a lot about how street photography works.
Most street photography tips you find online are about settings. Shutter speed, aperture, which lens to use. Useful things, and I write about them myself. But the lessons that really made a difference to me were hardly ever about technique. They were about looking, waiting and being honest about my own photos.
Here are fifteen lessons that took me years to properly understand. If you're completely new to this, start with What is street photography? and have a look through the Street photography checklist. Those cover the technical rules of thumb. This article is about everything around them.
- Walk more slowly than you think
- Choose a prime lens
- Go back to the same place
- Wait instead of chasing
- Look at your background first
- Get closer
- Follow the light
- Work with a keyword
- Learn to miss shots
- Be strict when choosing your photos
- Photograph in any weather
- Try looking without a camera
- Show your work
- Look at other people's work
- Respect and your own ethics
Walk more slowly than you think
Almost everyone walks too fast when they start street photography. You want to find something, so you go looking. And when you're searching, you tend to look ahead: towards the next corner, the next street.
You notice more when you walk more slowly. Someone checking their watch for the third time, light moving across a building, a shop window that's actually a mirror. It's easy to walk straight past those things at your normal pace, let alone when you're in a hurry.
A practical exercise: choose a stretch of street a few hundred metres long and give yourself an hour. Stay within that stretch. Chances are, after fifteen minutes you'll start seeing things you hadn't noticed when you arrived. A bus stop where everyone waits in the same pose, a shop door that keeps opening at the same moment.
I often find that something only happens once you've more or less decided that nothing is happening. You still need to be there when it does. I wrote a whole article about it: slowing down might be the most important lesson on this list for me.
At first, it feels like wasting time. It isn't.
Choose a prime lens
You can spend forever wondering which lens is best. I suspect that indecision is often just a way of avoiding going outside.
My rule of thumb: one camera and one lens are often enough. A 35mm or 50mm works for most street photography. Which one you choose matters less than sticking with it for a while.
With a fixed focal length, you eventually start seeing within that frame. Before you even lift the camera, you have a rough idea of what will be in your photo. That's one less thing to think about. On the street, that thinking usually costs you half a second you haven't got.
A zoom lens seems handy, but on the street you mostly end up turning the zoom ring. With a prime lens, you move yourself. You take a step forwards or backwards, so you more often end up somewhere other than where you started. I think that makes for better photos than a few extra millimetres of focal length.
I do a lot of my photography with a Fujifilm X100V, a compact camera with a fixed lens. It almost feels like an extension of my arm now. That's less about it being a special camera and more about never having to change anything on it.
Go back to the same place
There's a strange pressure in street photography to keep finding new places. A new city, a new neighbourhood, a street you've never visited.
I think you learn more from a place you already know. The setting no longer surprises you, so you're free to pay attention to what's happening. You know where the afternoon light falls, where people come round the corner and where they pause.
It doesn't have to be anywhere special. A square by the station, the shopping street in your own village, the junction you cycle past every day. Ordinary places become interesting when you see them often enough. Nijmegen city centre is that place for me. I know it well, but I'm nowhere near tired of looking.
Try returning to the same street corner for a few weeks. At different times, on different days. The first time, you see a street. By the fifth visit, you see a stage.
The opposite can teach you something too: two days in an unfamiliar city, where you're seeing everything for the first time. That's the idea behind REFRESH, the two-day masterclass in Paris and London. Though I suspect that even there, you'll look differently on day two than you did on day one.
Wait instead of chasing
Chasing means following a subject. Waiting means finding a setting and seeing who steps into it.
The second approach almost always produces better photos. You have time to work out your framing: which lines to include, what the light is doing, what's happening at the edges. Then you wait for the person who completes it.
A doorway, a patch of light on the pavement, a wall with a striking colour. People stepping into or out of somewhere are a subject I never tire of. You know it's going to happen. You just don't know who's coming.
How long should you wait? Longer than you think. Give a place at least ten minutes before moving on. While you're there, get your settings ready and focus on the spot where it needs to happen. Then all you have to do is press the shutter.
Waiting is boring. Until it isn't.
Look at your background first
I see this in photos all the time: a lovely moment, a beautiful face, and a lamppost growing straight out of someone's head.
Naturally, you look at people on the street. They're the point, after all. But most of a photo consists of everything that isn't that person. A cluttered background can completely overwhelm a strong moment.
The solution is usually simple: a step sideways, a step forwards, bending your knees a little. Before pressing the shutter, look at what's happening behind your subject. After a while, it becomes automatic. You'll also find yourself choosing the background and letting your subject walk into it.
Uncluttered backgrounds help enormously. A plain wall, a patch of sky, a large area of shadow. A busy background can work too, but it needs to be a choice rather than an accident.
Which brings us back to the previous lesson.
Get closer
Most beginners take their street photos from too far away. Understandably. You feel safer at a distance, and that's perfectly normal.
But that distance shows in the photo. Someone ten metres away is a little figure in a street. At two or three metres, they become a person. You can see an expression, hands doing something, a coat that tells you a story.
Getting closer doesn't have to mean being sneaky. I actually prefer having my camera in plain sight. If you act as though you're sneaking around, you feel that way too. I think it shows in your body language and in how people react.
If someone looks at you, a nod or a smile is usually enough. Most people just want to know you're not up to anything odd.
Start gently. On a busy market or shopping street, hardly anyone notices a camera. You can gradually get used to being closer.
A 35mm lens helps with that too. If you want someone to fill the frame with a lens like that, you have to get close. The lens makes some of the decision for you.
Follow the light
Try reversing the order: find the light first, then the subject. A patch of light between two buildings, low sunlight falling along a street, a brightly lit wall beside a deep shadow.
Good light can turn an ordinary passer-by into a photo. Bad light can turn a remarkable moment into a picture you delete once you get home.
Pay particular attention at the beginning and end of the day, and during the winter months, when the sun is lower and the shadows grow long. But there's no rule against harsh midday sun. It gives you black shadows and sharp contrasts. You can make very graphic photos with that.
Look at what the light does to the rest of your frame too. If you expose for the bright part of the photo, the shadows naturally become darker. Sometimes a cluttered background simply disappears into black. All you're left with is what's in the light.
Work with a keyword
My own approach is conceptual. I start with a keyword, including in my street photography workshops.
Choose one word before you head out. Solitude, for example. Or Interaction, Reflection, Rhythm. That word filters what you notice. Suddenly, you see people on their own everywhere, or reflections in windows and puddles.
It sounds restrictive, but it gives you a direction. Without a keyword, anything could be a photo. And when anything could be a photo, you usually see nothing. That one word helps you look.
There's no need to make a big thing of it. A keyword for one afternoon is enough. Tomorrow, it can be a different word. That's exactly how the conceptual street photography workshop works: you choose a word, we head out onto the street quickly, and I explain things as we walk.
I wrote 25 tips for conceptual street photography about this. Prefer working with assignments? My Dutch-language book Straatfotobijbel has 101, along with tips for each one.
Learn to miss shots
"Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst."
Henri Cartier-Bresson
I find that reassuring. All those failed photos weren't wasted, then. They're part of the work you need to do.
Street photography involves a lot of walking and looking. And missing a lot of shots. Someone turns away just as you press the shutter, a cyclist rides through your frame, the dog you spotted has already gone round the corner. It's part of it, and it stays that way however long you've been taking photos.
The difference is how you deal with it. At first, a missed moment feels like failure. Later, it becomes information: I was a little too far away, I was a little too late, I should have stayed here. Next time, you'll be in place.
A missed moment often returns in another form too. The same place, different light, another passer-by doing exactly the same thing. If you know what you missed, you'll recognise it sooner next time. That's why I don't mind missing shots. It's a sort of homework you set yourself.
Be strict when choosing your photos
A good street photographer is, above all, strict about which photos make the cut. That sounds less romantic than the decisive moment, but I think it's true.
After an afternoon on the street, you can easily have dozens or hundreds of photos. Almost all of them fall just short. That's fine, as long as you don't show them all. One strong photo says more about your work than ten reasonable ones.
What helps me is not choosing straight away. Leave your photos for a few days. You'll be less in love with the moment and better able to see what's actually in the frame. Make a rough selection first, then look again and cut some more.
If you're unsure about a photo, it usually isn't the one.
A useful question: would this photo stand on its own if I said nothing about it? If you have to explain what happened, what you saw or how cold it was, the story is in your head rather than in the photo. There's no shame in that. It just isn't a reason to show it.
Photograph in any weather
When it rains, most photographers stay at home. Yet rain gives you things you don't get on a sunny day: umbrellas, wet streets full of reflections, people sheltering under an awning.
I enjoy photographing in the rain myself. I've written a separate article about photographing in the rain, including how to keep your camera dry.
Fog, snow and grey days are worth your time too. Grey light is soft and forgiving. And it isn't over as soon as a shower stops: those first few minutes, with puddles on the street and people coming back out, are often the best part.
If it really gets too much, you can always stand under an awning for a while. There just happen to be plenty of people there too.
Try looking without a camera
This might sound odd in a list of photography tips. I'm including it anyway.
A camera can distract you too. You're busy with settings, the screen, wondering whether you got that last photo right. Meanwhile, you're walking past the very things you wanted to see. I wrote about that in My camera distracts me.
An exercise that helps me: take a walk along a street you know, without a camera, and just look. Where does the light fall? Where do people walk, and where do they stop? Take the camera again next time. You'll already know where to be.
It feels uncomfortable for a while, as though you've forgotten something. That feeling says quite a lot about how often we look through a viewfinder instead of looking around us.
Show your work
Photos don't get better by sitting on your hard drive. You need other people's eyes.
Show your work to people who take photos too, and ask for honest feedback. Ask something specific rather than "What do you think?" For example: does the background work, or should the framing have been tighter? A community such as straatfotografie.nl, which I run myself, is a good place for that.
Show five photos rather than fifty. Five photos get proper attention. With fifty, everyone scrolls past, yourself included.
Feedback is also a regular part of my workshops. Afterwards, you send in your photos and receive feedback by email. If you'd like to work on how you see over a longer period, Streetsessions might help: a six-month programme with thirteen emails.
Showing your work is nerve-racking. It gets easier the more you do it.
Look at other people's work
You don't only learn on the street. You also learn by spending hours looking at other people's photos, especially the ones you don't immediately understand.
Pick up a photography book too. In a book, you see how photos tell a story together and how a photographer decides what to include and what to leave out. You see less of that in individual photos on a screen.
Why does this photo work? Where is the photographer standing? What have they left out? I enjoy the colour work of Martin Parr and Alex Webb, two very different photographers. In both cases, colour holds the photo together rather than distracting from it.
On my site, there's a guide to well-known street photographers whose work is worth spending an afternoon with. There's no shame in copying, especially at first. Your own style will come later, often precisely because you can't quite manage to copy theirs.
If you'd like to know where it all began, read about the history of street photography too. Prefer listening? In 30 Minuten Sluitertijd, the podcast I make with Niels de Kemp, we've now spent more than a hundred episodes talking about photography.
Respect and your own ethics
The final lesson is about the people in your photos. Street photography relies on people who haven't asked to be photographed. That's worth pausing to think about.
What the law allows is one thing. I wrote my Dutch-language book De Wet van de Straat about that with lawyer mr. Charlotte Meindersma. What you're comfortable with is another question. Nobody can answer that for you.
I have my own boundaries, and they shift too. These days, for example, I also photograph children if I see a story in it. One thing I don't think will ever change: people putting food in their mouths never make good photos. I've written about the rest in an article on ethics in street photography.
Sometimes someone else has a say. I once wrote about a man who demanded that someone on a photo walk delete a photo immediately. He even called 112, although he wasn't recognisable in the photo. If he'd asked politely, it would have been deleted within a minute. It usually works the other way round too: being friendly gets you a long way.
My advice: give it some thought rather than leaving it to chance. Then you'll also know what to say if someone approaches you.
Now head outside
Fifteen lessons is a lot. You don't have to apply them all at once. Choose one, spend an afternoon on the street and see what changes.
If you're not sure where to start, I'd walk more slowly and choose a keyword. I think those two together change more than a new camera ever will. Give them a proper go for a few weeks, and the other lessons often follow naturally.
Want to practise this together, out on the street, with explanations as we go? Have a look at the workshops, in small groups of no more than five people. Or choose a 1-on-1 workshop: you choose the city, we start with coffee, and you can bring a friend for free.