Street Photography Settings

one of the things I'm most asked about is how I set my camera up for street photography and the answer is incredibly simple so in this video I thought I'd share with you my typical camera settings let me kick off by saying straight away that we all approach street photography different so how I set up my camera might not necessarily work for you and there is really no right or wrong way so what I'm about to describe works for me and I found that variations of this setup give me the best hit rate when I'm out and about shooting the streets so my mantra when it comes to settings for street photography is keep it simple I need to be able to shoot quickly and instinctively reacting to whatever's going on around me and if I have to stop faffing around with aperture or shutter speeds or focusing there's a good chance that I'm going to miss out on that crucial moment so to achieve this simplicity I have what I call my walk-around setting and this is a way of preparing the camera in advance which means that all I have to do is hit the button to get the shot I need in 98% of the situations okay that's not always going to be perfect and I can tweak these settings when the situation requires it so for example to deal with that unexpected great bit of light over there or if I want to a sheet achiever a shallow depth-of-field for whatever reason and I can make quick adjustments on the fly for situations like this using the exposure compensation dial that's what I call my magic button and I'll make a brief video about this at some point in the future but make these this fine-tuning happens with the exposure compensation but my main aim is to keep it really simple so let's dive straight in and I'll show you how I do it so I start off with shutter speed I find that it's usually necessary in street photography to have a far shutter speed a lot of the scenes we shoot have some movement in them that we need to freeze or perhaps we're moving and I can't afford to risk losing a shot because of subject blur or camera shake so I generally set my shutter speed to at least a two hundred and fiftieth of a second anything faster than that is fine I try not to go below that certainly in daylight the things things are different at night pad but in daylight two hundred and fiftieth of a second that's my minimum so my next consideration is aperture in street photography context is more often than not essential in a shot we need to know what is happening in the in the background what is the background contributing to the scene we're often looking at a were shooting layers or looking at a number of planes of focus front to back throughout an image and this this context this stuff that is in the background all the foreground is very possibly important to me so I want a fairly wide depth of field and okay I could take a lovely portrait of somebody across the road with a long lens with a very shallow depth of field there'd be a lovely crisp portrait but it wouldn't tell me anything about what that person's doing who they're with what's going on all that this context the dad's depth of meaning to an image so that's why my go-to aperture is f/8 sometimes smaller if the if it's incredibly bright so for example I was shooting in Lisbon recently and the light is so good and so bright in Lisbon I could happily shoot it f11 or f-16 all day but we're talking about my kind of my walk around my go to settings f/8 always f/8 so this gives me it's a good compromise it gives me a reasonably big depth of field but still letting a reasonable light and amount of light into the camera which will give me that far shutter speed so it's a it's a good compromise and then we've got ISO which are usually set to auto and I will let the ISO value ride as high as it likes for me at that tiny little bit of extra digital noise this imperceptible amount of noise generally is a price worth paying if it's between that and missing a shot entirely because of motion blur or camera shake and for most modern cameras such as the this fuji film x pro 3 which i'm currently shooting with high iso is a breeze it's no problem and the more you familiarize yourself with your camera and use it the more precisely you'll be able to gauge to what extent you can sacrifice image quality for increased shutter speed again it's a compromise a trade-off so in terms of exposure controls that's about it for my walk around setting a 250th of a second f/8 auto ISO that means that I can now forget about what's going on in the camera it's just a tool in my hands but I can dedicate all my thinking all my concentration all my mental energy into observing what's happening around me searching for subjects making sure I get the best possible composition and as I said all those little tweaks these creative tweaks can be done with the exposure compensation dial in terms of metering modes the the most in most cases I use the multi setting on my fuji film cameras which analyzes composition color and brightness distribution to determine exposure and that works just fine for me I've no need to go beyond that I know some people like to use spot metering that's fine whatever works for you I find it's the whole process of spot metering is too slow I'm very focused on the moment and by the timeout spot metered something the moments probably gone so multi works fine for me so finally on settings we we need to look at focusing and I would say around half the street photographers I know use autofocus the other half use manual focus they turn the autofocus and they'd manually focus using zone focusing the zone focusing system okay now modern auto focus is pretty incredible but even with all the recent advances in technology I find that manual focusing using zone focusing offers me a better success rate and I might cover this in a more detail in a future video but one of the problems with auto focus is that we tend to obsess about where that little green square is and we're locking onto our subject with that focus recompose that's what a lot of us do focus recompose or you're using the the multi-point auto focus and you're never quite sure what the cameras going to lock onto is it gonna be right this whole thing is just taking up too much of my thinking time and I just want to be able to shoot instantly and know that I've nailed it and with zone focusing that's exactly what I can do so very briefly the idea is that with a small aperture so let's say f/8 and with your lens pre focused on a specific distance okay let's say nine feet for argument's sake nine feet so f/8 pre focused on a specific distance everything within a certain zone will be acceptable sharp so as a real-world example if I set my thirty five mil equivalent lens to f/8 and focus on a point nine feet away so about three meters I then have a zone everything in that zone of and in this case between five feet and thirty feet will be sharp I know it'll be sharp and this is using manual focus so that's my operating zone I don't generally want to get much closer than five feet I generally don't want to be much anything beyond thirty feet away is probably not going to be that relevant to me so all I need to do is make sure my subject falls into that zone of 5 feet and 30 feet and I know it'll be sharp in reality that 30 feet probably extends a bit further than this I'm being cautious here but I'm pretty confident it'll be sharp if the conditions are bright enough then yeah I'll close down the aperture even more maybe to f11 f-16 where that range just increases so at f11 with my 35 mil lens my 35 mil equivalent 35 mil lens that zone goes from about 4 feet pretty much to infinity and the wider the lens the bigger the zone and obviously also the smaller the aperture the bigger the zone so for example if I were shooting with my 16 mil lens really wide-angle lens at f-16 okay I just switch it to manual focus and I know that everything between about 2 feet and infinity will be sharp so why would I want to use autofocus I'd be nuts zone focusing makes me faster it makes shooting more intuitive and it makes me more confident about getting the shot and I highly recommend giving it a go and most people who do who okay I know people are skeptical at first but people who do give it a go find it's liberating try it so there are a couple of caveats with zone focusing it only really works effectively with prime lenses of 35 mil and wider that's in full-frame terms so if you're using a crop sensor say 23 mils 24 mil or wider but 35 million full frame terms and it doesn't work particularly well with zoom lenses so you need a reasonably wide angle prime lens and you will probably find it works a dream so that was a very quick overview of zone focusing and it's something that I will pick up again in a future video I think there's a very good app that I use and if you need help calculating what where your focus point should be I just quoted 9 feet because that's my most used focus point but there are loads of apps loads of free apps you can get for your phone whether it's Android or by phone and there's a great free app I use called set my camera and I'll put a link in the description box below it's worth downloading so the final thing to consider here when we're talking about settings is raw or JPEG personally I shoot both so my camera has two card slots and I will choose a raw file - one card and a JPEG - the other card now this keeps shooting raw keeps all my keeps my options open further down the line so if it comes to needing to change white balance adjustments for example or I need to do some clever monochrome conversions I can do that much more effectively with a raw file and it just makes my work flow smoother but also shooting to this JPEG on to card 2 gives me the option of using the film simulations that come with the Fuji film cameras and I know they come with other cameras as well so sometimes and this is particularly relevant when I'm shooting projects I'm looking for a consistent aesthetic or a look so I get that look using one of the film simulation modes straight out of the camera so that's how I set my camera up for street photography and as I said at the beginning there is no right or wrong way and you must find the method that works for you I described what works for me perhaps you want to give this methodology ago or if not maybe your your way is better and it works for you but maybe there's something you picked up here that you can adapt to your style so that's it for today I hope you found this one useful and as always I'll be happy to answer any questions if you pop them in the comments box below if you enjoyed the video please do give a like and do subscribe to my channel for lots more to come about street photography if you're interested in a workshop I run street photography workshops from beginner to advanced level please have a look at Street snappers calm and finally if you don't already receive it I publish a regular street photography newsletter every couple of weeks which I'm sure you find interesting just let me have your name and email address and I'll happily send it to you so thanks as always for tuning in and I hope to see you next time bye for now [Music]

Channel: Brian Lloyd Duckett | Street Photography

Views: 151,151

Keywords: street photography, street photographer, street photography workshops, street photography course, street photography videos, learn street photography, documentary photography

Id: Mke8_d4iX9Q

Length: 14min 0sec (840 seconds)

Published: Tue May 12 2020