Camera settings for street photography

There’s no right or wrong way and you have to do what works for you. We all do things differently - so I’ll say straight away that we all approach street photography from different perspectives, so how I set up my camera might not necessarily work for you. What I’m about to describe works for me and I’ve found that variations of this set-up give me the best hit rate when I’m shooting street photography. These settings will apply to any digital camera, whatever brand you use.

Check out my YouTube video for street photography settings

My mantra when it comes to settings for street photography is ‘keep it simple’. I need to be able to shoot quickly and instinctively, so that I can react instantly to anything that’s happening around me. If I have to start faffing around with aperture or shutter speeds or focusing, or looking at menu options, there’s a good chance going to miss out on that crucial moment. I want all my attention - one hundred percent of it - to be focused on scenes and activity around me and not on what the camera’s doing - I need all that to take care of itself.

To achieve this simplicity, I have what I call my ‘walk-around setting’, and this is a way of preparing my camera which means that all I have to do is hit the button to get the shot I need in 98% of situations. Of course that’s not always going to be perfect and I can tweak my settings when I need to - for example to deal with changing lighting conditions - or to achieve a shallow depth of field - or perhaps to achieve a perfect silhouette.

Exposure settings

My first consideration is the exposure mode and I use aperture priority pretty much 100% of the time - and that’s because control of the depth of field is really important in the way I shoot. Now turning to ISO, which I usually set to auto. But it’s not quite as simple as that. The way I set up my auto ISO is to start off in the menu settings, where on most cameras you can set some parameters. I’ll set the ISO range from 200 to 3,200 for most daytime situations, then I’ll dial in the minimum shutter speed value, which I’ll set at 200th of a second. This will pretty much guarantee me a fast shutter speed all the time - so the camera needs more light it will raise the ISO rather than use a slower shutter speed.

Now, you may be thinking, what about the noise? For me, a tiny bit of extra digital noise is a price worth paying if it’s between that and missing a shot because of motion-blur or maybe camera shake. For most modern cameras, high ISO is a breeze and you’ll find that the more you work with your camera, the easier you’ll find it to gauge to what extent you want to sacrifice image quality for increased shutter speed. There's always a compromise, a trade-off.

Let’s now come back to shutter speed, and why a fast shutter speed is important. A lot of scenes we shoot have some movement that we want to freeze, or perhaps we’re moving - and I can’t afford to risk losing a shot because of subject blur or camera shake. And that’s why I set that minimum shutter speed of 1/200th sec in the ISO menu.

What about aperture? In street photography, context is more often than not useful to the shot. I could take a great shot of a person with an extremely shallow depth of field and yes, it might have a lovely aesthetic - but that wouldn’t tell me anything about what that person's doing, where they are, who they're with, what's going on behind them and so on - all the context which adds depth and meaning to an image. Then we have the notion of layers to consider. Layers are really important in street photography and this is how we add volume and depth to an image. And the smaller the aperture, the more the various layers are in focus. So that’s why my go-to aperture is F/8 - or if I'm shooting somewhere really bright I may be on f/11 or even f/16, which gives me the depth of field I need, whilst still letting a reasonable amount of light into the lens. But if you stick with F/8 as your baseline you won’t go far wrong - it’s a good compromise aperture. 

With these settings I can now forget about what’s going on in the camera and can dedicate all my thinking - all my concentration and mental energy - into observing what’s happening around me, searching for subjects and ensuring I get the best possible composition.

However, there are plenty of occasions when we need to make a creative adjustment to the exposure, such as letting more light into the camera or, more usually, blocking some light out. I do all this fine tuning using the exposure compensation dial. This gives me the ultimate exposure control and with practice, you find making exposure adjustments with this really quick and instinctive. A real life example of how I use the exposure compensation function is when I’m walking down the street and the sun’s behind me; my default exposure compensation setting will be at least minus-one - maybe more - and this should do three things: firstly it will ensure the highlights are protected, giving much more defined skin tones and cutting out any hotspots. Secondly it will make the colours pop and thirdly it make shadow areas more well-defined and dense - and that’s a look I like. So whenever I’m out shooting, my thumb gets a real workout because it’s on this dial all day long, making either very subtle tweaks, say a third of a stop, or bigger adjustments like minus 2 or minus 3.

You’re now perhaps thinking - why not just shoot in manual which would have the same effect but would arguably give you more control? The reason I do it this way is because I don’t have to think about anything. If I start having to make decisions about whether to change the aperture, the shutter speed or this ISO, I could be wasting valuable seconds and missing the shot. This way, all my changes to exposure are made very quickly and instinctively using exposure compensation. The more you practice this, the more it becomes second nature and you do it without thinking.

Other settings

In terms of metering, in most cases I use the ‘multi’ or ‘matrix’ setting, which analyses composition, colour, and brightness distribution to determine exposure - and that works just fine for me. I know some people use spot metering, which is fine if you have the time but with the kind of street photography I tend to shoot, I don’t have that luxury.

White balance is set to auto as I could be moving around different lighting conditions and I don’t want to be constantly making changes - and the camera really does get it right most of the time.

Next we can look at file format - RAW or JPEG? Personally I shoot both, but the main file I use will be the RAW, if only to keep all my options open further down the line, for example when it comes to white balance adjustments. If my camera has two card slots, I usually record a RAW to one card and a JPEG to the other, thus making my workflow smoother and giving me the option of using the film simulations (if I’m using Fujifilm cameras). This could be useful if, say, I’m working on a project and I’m looking for a consistent aesthetic - or a look - and the film simulation can give me that look straight out of the camera.

Focusing 

Then finally there's focusing. Around half the street photographers I know use autofocus and the other half manually focus using zone focusing. Modern autofocus is pretty incredible, but even with the recent advances in technology I find that zone focusing offers me a better success rate. I’ll cover this technique in more detail in a future article, but very briefly the idea is that with a small aperture and your lens pre-focused on a specific distance, everything within a certain zone will be acceptably sharp. As a real world example, if I set my 28mm lens to f/8 and focus on a point around 9 feet, or 3 metres, away, everything between about 5 feet and 30 feet will be sharp. So that’s my operating zone - “ZONE focusing” - all I need to do is make sure that my subject is in the range of 5 feet to 30 feet and I’m pretty confident it’ll be sharp. If the conditions are bright enough, I can close down to f/11, and now my in-focus range goes from just over 4 feet to not far short of infinity.

The wider the lens, the bigger the zone, and also the smaller the aperture, the bigger the zone. So if I were shooting with my 16mm lens set at f/16, everything between about 2 feet and infinity would be sharp, so why on earth would I want to use autofocus? Zone focusing makes me faster, makes shooting more intuitive and makes me more confident about getting my shot. I highlyrecommend giving it a go - it’s liberating!

However, there are a couple of caveats: zone focusing only really works effectively with prime lenses of 35mm and wider and it doesn’t work particularly well with zooms.

Some people use back button focusing, which removes the focusing function from the shutter button and you use a button on the back of the camera to acquire focus - so this can be a nice hybrid option of manual focus and AF. I tend not to use it but if you like it, go for it - it can be an effective method.

So that’s how I set my camera up for street photography, and as I said at the beginning, there’s no right or wrong way and you must find the method which works for you. Perhaps you might give them a go, or if not hopefully you still picked something up that you can adapt to your style.

You can watch my YouTube video about this here