Why aren't my street photos sharp?

The photo looks fine on the back of your camera. Someone is just stepping out of the shadows, the light is right, the background is uncluttered. At home, you open it up on a big screen and there it is: the face is soft. Not by much, but enough to rule the photo out.

I find that one of the most frustrating things about street photography. The moment was good. You had it, or so you thought. If your street photo isn't sharp, you only discover that missed opportunity when you get home. Luckily, you can almost always work out what went wrong.

I think there are five causes. They look similar in a photo, but each needs a different solution. So I'd start by looking closely at what's actually blurred. You can fiddle with your settings afterwards.

First, work out what kind of blur you're looking at

View the photo at 100 per cent at home. That lets you see the pixels as they are, without your screen shrinking them and making things look better. Almost everything looks sharp on your camera's little screen. Very reassuring, but not much use.

Then ask yourself three questions. Is everything equally blurred, including the wall and the paving slabs? Is your subject blurred while something else in the photo is sharp? And can you see a smear in one direction, as though someone has stretched the photo a little?

If everything is blurred, with a slight double edge throughout, that usually points to your own movement. A smear only around the person who was walking points to a shutter speed that was too slow. A sharp background with a soft subject means the focus was in the wrong place. And a photo where nothing is really sharp, but nothing is moving either, often comes down to misjudging zone focus or having too little depth of field.

Once you know what you're looking at, the solutions are fairly straightforward.

1. Your shutter speed is too slow

People on the street move. They walk, cycle, turn their heads, swing bags. A shutter speed that's fine for a stationary building is often too slow for a passer-by.

My rule of thumb is at least 1/250 of a second. For someone walking at an easy pace, that's usually enough. For a cyclist riding across your frame or a child running, I'd rather use 1/500 or faster. The closer you are to your subject, the faster they move through your frame and the more this matters.

It's fairly easy to spot. The building is sharp, so is the pavement, but hands and feet are smeared. Often the face is still reasonably sharp, because a head moves more slowly than an arm.

The solution is simple: a faster shutter speed. That means less light, so you raise your ISO. Plenty of photographers find that scary because they're worried about noise. I think noise is a much smaller problem than motion blur. You can reduce noise a little at home. You can't fix a smeared hand.

A useful setting on many cameras is auto ISO with a minimum shutter speed. You tell the camera never to go slower than 1/250, and it adjusts the ISO accordingly. One less thing to think about on the street.

2. You're moving

The second cause is on your side of the camera. You take the shot while walking, you've just stretched your arm out, or you press the button so hard that the whole camera jerks a little.

You can recognise it by the blur across the whole photo. Everything has a slight double outline, including the things that weren't moving. It's more noticeable at long focal lengths than with a wide-angle lens.

There's an old rule of thumb: your shutter speed should be at least one divided by your focal length. With a 35mm lens, that's 1/35 of a second, and with a 50mm, it's 1/50. On the street, your shutter speed is often much faster already because of all those moving people. So this rule mainly matters when it gets dark and you want to slow things down.

Your stance helps. Keep your elbows against your body. Stand still as you take the shot, even if it's only for half a second. Press the shutter button gently, as though you're stroking it. If you look through the viewfinder, the camera rests against your face for extra support. You don't get that with a screen at arm's length.

A light, compact camera sometimes helps too, simply because you hold it more steadily. In my article on cameras and lenses for street photography, I wrote about why I use a small camera with a fixed lens so much. That has more to do with looking than sharpness, but it helps with both.

3. Your autofocus chooses the background

I think this is the most common cause, and the most annoying. Your subject is soft, while the shop window behind them is pin-sharp. The camera has focused perfectly well. Just not on what you wanted.

This mainly happens with small subjects in a busy frame. Left to choose for itself, autofocus looks for contrast and detail. A bike rack or a sign with text often has more of both than a face five metres away. Face detection sometimes helps, but it's just as likely to pick the wrong face when there are three people in the frame.

Here's what I'd do: choose a fixed, small focus point instead of a large area. At least then you know where the camera is looking. If you don't want your subject in the middle, you can move the point, or focus first and then adjust your framing slightly. The latter works fine as long as the distance to your subject doesn't change.

Better still: focus in advance on the spot where you want things to happen. Choose a setting, focus on the kerb or the doorway where someone will be standing, and wait. That's also one of the lessons in my street photography tips: waiting instead of chasing. The camera has nothing left to search for at the decisive moment. That helps with sharpness.

Getting closer helps too. A person who fills more of your frame is a clearer target for autofocus. If you're unsure whether you're allowed to do that, read my article on photographing people on the street and what the law says about it.

4. You've misjudged your zone focus

With zone focusing, you switch autofocus off completely. You focus manually at a fixed distance, say three metres, and choose an aperture that gives you enough depth of field. Anything happening roughly within that zone is sharp enough. All you have to do is press the shutter.

That's particularly useful when you want to work quickly. The drawback: you need to be able to judge distances. If you think someone is three metres away when they're actually one and a half metres away, they'll fall just outside your zone. The photo looks as though the camera couldn't focus. It was only doing exactly what you asked.

You can recognise this because something in the photo is sharp, just not your subject. Look at what is sharp. Is it in front of the person or behind them? That tells you straight away which way your estimate was off.

You can practise judging distances. Walk down a street and keep picking things out: a lamppost, a bench, a bin. Estimate the distance, then walk over while counting your steps. After a few weeks, you'll have a rough feel for three metres. Paving slabs help too, if you know how big they are.

Many cameras show a bar or scale during manual focusing that indicates the zone that's in focus. Useful for understanding what your aperture does. On the street, though, you don't have much time for it, so eventually you need to know it without looking.

I've explained exactly how I set up zone focus and when I use it in the article on settings and zone focus. And the street photography checklist brings the rules of thumb together in brief.

5. Your aperture is too wide

Lenses with a wide maximum aperture are popular, and I understand why. At f/1.4 or f/2, you get a soft background and can keep shooting as it gets dark. But the depth of field at an aperture like that is very shallow, especially when you're close.

That's tricky on the street. Your subject moves, you move, and the distance changes by a few centimetres between focusing and pressing the shutter. With a small aperture, that falls within the depth of field. At f/1.4, the eye is just outside the plane of focus and the ear is sharp.

So there is a narrow strip somewhere that's in focus, but not where you wanted it. Often just in front of or just behind the face.

My rule of thumb is an aperture around f/4.5 or smaller, meaning a higher number. If you use zone focus, you're better off stopping down a bit further, because you need the whole zone. Again, that means less light, so you end up with a higher ISO. On the street, I almost always think that's a good trade.

When it gets really dark, you have to juggle things. You can't have everything at once: a fast shutter speed, a small aperture and a low ISO. In the article on street photography after dark, I wrote about how to make those choices.

When blur is welcome

Sharpness isn't an end in itself. There are plenty of street photos where the blur is what tells the story.

One familiar technique is panning. You choose a slower shutter speed, say 1/30 or 1/15 of a second, and move your camera along with a cyclist or passer-by. If it works, your subject is reasonably sharp and the background is smeared into streaks. You can see the speed in the photo. It often doesn't work, and that's part of it.

You can also hold the camera still and let the world move. A stationary person among a stream of blurred people at a station or on a busy pavement. Or you deliberately move the camera during the exposure, making light and shapes shift. Especially after dark, this produces photos that are more about atmosphere than detail.

To me, the difference between that and a failed photo is simple: was it a choice? A deliberately slow shutter speed with a clear idea behind it is different from one that was too slow by accident. The articles on street photography settings and photographing after dark explain more about how to play with that.

And to be honest, I often find a strong moment that's slightly soft more interesting than a pin-sharp photo where nothing happens. Sharpness makes a good photo better. It won't save a boring one.

Checking at 100 per cent at home

After an afternoon on the street, I look through my photos in Capture One. If you want to know why a photo isn't sharp, view it at 100 per cent and find the sharpest point. That can tell you a lot.

If the sharpest point is behind your subject, the autofocus picked the background or you overestimated the distance. If it's in front, your subject was further away than you thought. If there's no sharp point anywhere, you're looking at movement, either yours or your subject's.

Then look at the photo's data. Shutter speed, aperture, ISO and focal length are stored with every photo. If your shutter speed was 1/60, that tells you enough. If it was 1/1000 and the photo is still soft, look at the focusing.

You learn most by doing this with a whole afternoon's photos. You might not notice it in a single photo, but together they often reveal a pattern. Perhaps all your blurred photos were taken in the shade, where the camera quietly chose a slower shutter speed. Or perhaps you keep overestimating distances. Then you know what to watch for next time.

I wouldn't be too quick to delete them either. A photo that doesn't quite work technically can still teach you a lot about why you were standing there and what you saw. You can discard it when you're making your selection. That's a separate job.

If you notice yourself making the same mistake over and over, it helps to have someone walking beside you who sees it happen. That's also why I explain things during the walk in my street photography workshops, rather than in a room beforehand. You see the difference straight away on your camera screen, and later at home at 100 per cent.

Sharpness is a habit

The good thing about blur is that there's almost always an explanation. Which means you can do something about it. A faster shutter speed, a fixed focus point, a slightly smaller aperture, and learning to judge distances until you no longer think about it. After a while, it becomes second nature and your attention goes back where it belongs: to the street.

Want to work on this together? In the street photography workshops, you walk in a small group of no more than five people, and we look at your settings along the way. If you'd rather have all my attention to yourself, a one-to-one workshop might suit you better. You choose the city, and we start with coffee.