Street Photography: Everything You Need to Know

Street photography is something anyone can learn.

Welcome to street photography 101.

Need a camera for street photography?
Check out this list of best street photography cameras of 2019.

Start here:
Take a deep-dive:

– And also, my favorite camera settings for street photography.

How to overcome your fear of street photography

How to do street portraits

If you are looking for cameras for street photography, I’d highly recommend the Fujifilm x100f and the Ricoh GR II.

(Update: Today, my favorite camera for street photography is the brand new X-T3 from Fujifilm.

Basic Street Photography 101 for beginners

Start. Just start. If you already started doing it – continue to do it. And keep doing it.

And it’s important for me to note, that I’m not a professional photographer.

I’m a beginner, who is learning how to improve my photography every day – That’s why I started my 365 days of street photography project.

You don’t need a crazy expensive camera to do great street photography. It helps to have a great camera and if you are on the look for a great camera for street photography, I’d recommend small Ricoh GR II or Fuji film x100f I own both of them and It feels like they are made for street photography – I’m extremely happy with both of them.

If you are more of a visual learner, make sure to watch my street photography videos on Youtube. I do a mix of film photography and digital photography.

This is a little showcase of some of my street photography.

best street photographers — See all my Black & White Street Photography

iPhone photography — See all My iPhone Photography

While I think tips and tricks can help you, I really believe practice on the street and reading is the only way to get better. See the list of photography books I recommend. I’m not a big fan of photography courses and workshops – for sure they work if the teacher is good, but they are often very expensive and I believe we can teach ourselves a lot! If you’re new to street photography, then watch this video about being too shy for street photography or this one about street phootography using film. If you are unsure about what lens or focal lenght to go with, then watch this video about picking your lens for street photography.

Composition, Framing & Angles

In street photography, you have a lot of liberty to freestyle it. And there aren’t really many rules. That said, to make a really good street photo, it helps to understand the basics of composition, angles, and know how to frame a photo.

It’s a really good idea to think about framing – adjust your composition – take the same photo from different angles, and look for triangles, isolate objects, play with foreground and background.

How to edit your photos

I edit all my photos in Capture One and if you’re a Fuji photographer you should use Capture One too.

If you have seen my photos, you’d know that I don’t use a large amount of time on editing. A great photo usually doesn’t need much editing, so I would rather focus on taking better photos, than getting better at fixing a bad photo. Read more about what I do create better photographs.

Exposure: ISO, Aperture & Shutter Speed

The exposure triangle. It’s one of the more complicated things to wrap your head around when getting into street photography or photography in general. But there is a reason why everyone talks about – it’s what makes or break a photo. For a beginner, and what I did myself when I started taking photos, was to put my camera to the “p” mode, which means you only control the ISO – the camera will take care of everything else. Today, I still shoot 80% of my photos using the cameras P mode.

Marketing for photographers

I just finished a marketing guide for photographers. In the guide, you will learn how to use Instagram, how to use street photography hashtags, Twitter, 500px, Flickr, Tumblr and reddit to get more exposure and grow your followers.