The article was updated by James Maher and Jay Dempsey in April 2023.
It’s a lot of fun to take candid street photos, but they can be difficult for beginners.
This article contains my 19 favorite tips and strategies for improving your candid street photos. These are the techniques I have developed over a decade photographing in the street – I guarantee you will get great results if you use them.
Let’s get started.
1. Travel Light and Minimal Gear
Beginner street photographers often use a DSLR with a midrange lens. While it is fine to shoot with this equipment, reducing the weight of your gear will make an enormous difference. You’ll have more energy and better coordination, plus you’ll be more eager to explore. You will also be able photograph in places where a larger camera would not feel right.
What type of gear would I recommend?
Consider a smaller street camera. Mirrorless cameras, especially Micro Four Thirds and APS-C options are lighter and smaller. They also look less intimidating for the people that you photograph.
If you want to use your DSLR, then consider using a smaller prime lens such as a 50mm or 35mm. A 50mm f/1.8 lens, for example, is smaller than a standard zoom. The optics will be of high quality and the price will be low.
Prime lenses are limited to a certain focal length. This can be a liberating experience. You will learn how to use the lens by sticking with 35mm or 50mm, the two focal lengths most popular among street photographers.
2. Hold your camera effectively
How you hold your camera makes a huge difference to candid street photography. The camera strap is best wrapped around my wrist rather than my neck. This makes it much easier to move the camera and also to shoot with your hip. If you have to.
While walking down the street, I hold my camera at a 45 degree angle in front of me, half-way between vertical and horizontal. My finger is on the trigger. It is easier to get the camera in the right place if I want to capture something spontaneous without alerting the subject.
3. Hold your camera tightly
When you’re taking pictures, keep your camera as close to your body as possible. When you let it hang from your neck or wrist, you’ll have to find and grab it before you can put it in front of your eyes when an incredible moment happens.
This will not only cause you to miss out on great shots but also make your camera more visible. It’s best to keep your camera in hand at all times if you want to get candid images.
You should also try to raise the camera as high as possible. You won’t even have to move an arm when you snap a picture!
4. Fill the frame up with your subject.
The biggest criticism I have for street photographers is that they often choose to photograph the whole street, resulting in a photo with a very interesting subject. However, the photographer chose to only shoot a portion of it. Cut out the rest and fill your frame with only what’s important. Allow some space for imagination.
With a prime lens, and moving subjects, it’s not always possible to get the perfect angle or be in the right spot on the fly. Do not be afraid to improve your angle or crop the image afterward. It is important to note that candid street photography differs from landscape photography in which you can plan every aspect of the image before shooting. Even if you only use the crop tool to make a small correction, it is important that you become familiar with using this tool.
5. Shooting from the hip
If you don’t need to look through your viewfinder or raise the camera to your chest, it will be much easier to take a picture of someone without them knowing.
The benefit of shooting with your hip and the camera on your wrist is that your arm becomes a natural extension. You can take pictures sideways, or even in reverse if necessary. You can integrate your lens without anyone noticing. With either one or both hands holding the camera you can shoot with the hip. One hand allows for more flexibility in aiming.
Keep your arm at your side, and angle the camera in the direction of the action. If you want to capture the exact shot, you can bend your elbow or raise your arm, but you should be discrete.
6. Try low diagonal angles
A second advantage to shooting from the hips is that you are able to capture people at a low angle. My candid photos are often taken from a low and close angle, which elongates the person and lets the subject fill the frame. It is not always true, but it is often my preference.
A slight diagonal angle is very pleasing for vertical Portraits. This angle adds energy to a photograph and lets you capture more of your surroundings. The angle creates an entrance for the eye and keeps it there as the eye bounces between the subject and the surroundings.
7. Be ready to make quick changes.
I prefer to take candid street photos in Manual mode because I want my exposure set up before I start taking the photo. You never know what the camera will do when you are taking close-up photos. This can lead to some messed up exposures.
Manual shooting in the street is a challenge. You will need to change settings if you suddenly move from a sunny to a shady area. I keep in mind a general exposure setting for sunny and shady conditions and switch between them.
What happens if there is a sudden event? Imagine you are walking down a bright street with everything set up just right, and you suddenly see two locksmiths sitting in a dark van. One is asleep and the other is about to light a cigarette. Moment is just around the corner:
In that case, I switch to Aperture Priority, and I’ve set my camera with a small aperture. You will lose some depth of focus, but you can still use it in extremely bright or very dark conditions if you have a shutter speed that is fast enough. This can be done with the shutter speed as well (via Shutter Priority Mode).
8. Raise your ISO
If you attend photography workshops or take photography classes, you’ve probably encountered the standard advice: keep your ISO as low as possible.
Yet while high ISOs can create unpleasant noise effects, modern cameras offer very impressive high-ISO capabilities; you can often shoot at ISOs of 1600 and 3200 with minimal noise, which is why, in my view, you shouldn’t be afraid to boost that ISO.
I typically shoot candid street photos at ISO 400 in sunlight, ISO 800 in light shade, ISO 1600 in dark shade, ISO 3200 at dusk, and ISO 6400 at night. With an entry-level or less-advanced camera, I would drop this by one stop (i.e., shoot ISO 200 in sunlight and up to ISO 3200 when doing street night photography).
You see, a high ISO gives you a huge advantage. It lets you use a fast shutter speed, even in low light – which means you can shoot handheld, you can freeze motion, and you can use a small aperture to maximize depth of field.
(Why is a deep depth of field necessary? For one, if you fail to focus on your subject, you may still get a sufficiently sharp shot. Plus, it’ll let you keep multiple subjects sharp within a single composition, which is a great way to add context and complexity to your candid images.)
9. Try zone focusing
Zone focusing is the technique of turning your camera to manual focus mode, pre-focusing it to a distance of about 8-10 feet, and then capturing your subject once they are in the range of sharpness for your camera. This is easier to do with a wide-angle lens with a medium to small aperture such as f/8 to f/16 so that there is more area of your image in focus. Keep in mind that this is a skill that can be improved – there are many photographers who can zone focus well even at f/2.
You can read more about zone focusing here, and while it is a little difficult to learn at first, you will quickly get much better at it. The main benefit of this type of focusing is so that you no longer have to lock the autofocus in on your subject. This allows you to be a little more spontaneous with your shooting, and it will give you an added split second to take the photograph. That, in turn, will allow you to better capture those very fast moving moments.
Most importantly, it will allow you to be a little more candid than you can be using autofocus. Since you won’t have to point the camera directly at your subject to lock in the focus nor will you have to look through the viewfinder to make sure you are focusing correctly, you can be much more inconspicuous. This will allow you to shoot from the hip and still know that your shots will be sharp.
10. Pick a spot and wait
Street photographers often just take a camera, walk around, and explore – but by constantly walking, you may be doing yourself a disservice. You’ll miss out on the shots that require a bit of patience (which are often better than the shots you’ll get when walking around).
So instead of walking constantly, head outside – and when you find a promising location, linger for a while and wait for something to happen.
By picking a spot, you give a magical moment plenty of time to materialize – and if you’ve chosen your location carefully, you’ll be able to combine subject interest and a good background for a top-notch result. After all, it’s when the right location merges with an interesting moment that a great photograph appears.
Additionally, if you lie in wait, you’ll be faster at noticing your surroundings. You won’t be focused on walking, so you can instead spend time scanning the flow of people.
Plus, people will be coming into your scene rather than the other way around. This might not seem like a big deal, but in my experience, it makes the whole practice of candid street shooting easier and less confrontational.
One last note: If you want to do candid street photography while remaining unnoticed, make sure you raise your camera to your eye before your subject walks into the image. Then keep your camera up as the subject leaves the scene. That way, it’ll seem like you were just photographing the background!
11. Chase the action
It will be important for you to eventually photograph in all types of situations, from less busy to very crowded, but particularly when you are learning, go where a lot of action is happening. Go to fairs, get out at busy times, shoot from busy corners. The more that is happening, the more invisible you will be, and the less you will be noticed by other people. This will help a lot with your comfort level.
In addition, if you’re in a busy area, you’ll often have all sorts of interesting elements around you, so you won’t have to move much. That way, you will be able to spend more of your energy watching your surroundings for a good moment to occur. This, of course, doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t photograph while you are walking and exploring, just that you should do your best to stay in busy areas.
12. Be an actor (and don’t make eye contact)
As a street photographer, you can benefit a lot from acting. You might play the part of a spaced-out tourist, engulfed in something happening across the street, or perhaps someone who is lost and has to stop for a moment to collect himself, but you are certainly not someone who looks like he is about to take a photo.
I like to act like I’m walking around daydreaming, just spaced out by my surroundings and looking in the somewhat opposite direction of what I want to photograph. I will make my path intersect in the right way with the subject and then stop as if I’m gathering myself or as if I see something interesting. My body will often be angled away from the subject while my camera will be at my hip pointing up at it. Then I take a photograph or two and walk out of there like nothing happened.
Most importantly though, is to never point your head directly at the subject, or god forbid, make eye contact! There is something almost evolutionary about eye contact that will make a person immediately notice you. Even for a split second, it will ruin your cover. Instead, try to look ‘through the person’.
