Ultimate Beginner’s Guide to Street Photography

The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide for Street Photography

Street photography is the new black! Everybody is passionately doing it. But there are some who remain clueless. In a simple explanation, street photography is about documenting life in its purest form, meaning, you’ve captured the emotion and soul of your subjects. It doesn’t necessarily need to be taken on the street, any outdoor places will do.

If street photography is something you wanted to try, here’s a beginner’s guide on how to start in street photography.

THE ULTIMATE BEGINNER’S GUIDE FOR STREET PHOTOGRAPHY

1.    Choose the ultimate lens

Lenses are just like cameras, they have different types and each type has specific purposes. That’s why in choosing a lens, you must consider the situation you wanted to capture. For street photography, the lenses recommended are wide-angle lens or lenses with large aperture and focal length. These types have the capability to get closer to your subject and get as many details.

2.    Adjust Camera Settings

Next,adjust your camera setting. Adjusting your camera setting is one of the important things to do before taking pictures to ensure you’ll get the result you wanted. Start it by choosing the shooting mode: manual or automatic.

For most street photographers, they prefer manual mode and they’ll just adjust its shutter speed and ISO whenever they needed it. If you don’t want to manually adjust these two every time, you can set one in auto then manual to the other. Once you set the other manually, the other will automatically adjust accordingly.

If you’re clueless about camera settings or its terminologies, you can always search photography or technology blogs (e.g. Cameraseals.com) that provides basic tutorials to help you get started.

3.    Take your camera wherever you go

Now that you’re all set – you’ve chosen the type of lenses to use and set it to the right settings; you’re ready to take pictures! This is the exciting part of photography; going somewhere where your mind will be blown away by inspirations. It is an adventure! And since interesting things happen every second of our life, we need to be prepared… always. That’s a Boy Scout motto but it’s also applicable to photography. So, wherever you go make sure you have your camera with you.

4.    Get closer to your subjects

Street photography is all about emotion and soul. To get that, you need to get a closer look at your subjects – watch closely as they move and wait for them to do an interesting gesture. Patience is the key here, so, you must have lots of it when you’re doing street photography.

5.    Think Out of the box

Street photography is just like any other things that have different techniques to do it right. There’s nothing wrong in following those techniques, particularly for beginners. But don’t forget to add your touch to it. No one wants a copycat. So stay original by thinking something out of the box. Be playful and experimental with your background and subject, and then let your imagination flow and capture it when you think it’s the right time.

6.    Shoot at night

Shooting at night is much more exciting than shooting in the day, in my opinion. There are lots of details, texture, and emotions that you can only see at night. Plus, the darkness of the night is a good setting for a romantic love story, mafia meeting in the ‘50s style or scary Halloween monster.

It’s definitely exciting but not as easy as shooting in the day. When shooting at night you will always need to watch your camera’s shutters speed to avoid blur and adjust ISO and aperture accordingly to compensate for the low light.

7.    Have fun and enjoy your photography

Photography backdrop may be a serious profession for some people, but it doesn’t change the fact that it’s a fun activity. So, don’t forget to smile and have fun! Life is too short to frown.

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About The Author: Hi, I’m George. I have been a camera enthusiast from 2008. Cameraseals is my personal blog where I share most of my interests and experiences from using cameras. You will find helpful topics even if you’re a beginner or long-time user.
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Image Source:  Pixabay