Street Photography: Light, Settings and Lenses

David Coleman teaches zone focusing for decisive street moments: f/11 in aperture priority with a 21 to 35mm lens, 1/125 minimum shutter and auto ISO. He sets the zone via the lens's depth-of-field scale, the 35, 6, 11 rule, four to twelve feet sharp, or zone-focusing tables and PhotoPills.

Sean Tucker hunts for sunlight bouncing off London's glass and steel, waiting beside a perforated metal wall for passers-by to cross pools of reflected light. He shoots a Fuji X-T20 and 23mm f/2 at 1/2000, f/2.8, ISO 200, then crops in Darkroom and dodges and burns in Snapseed.

Sean Tucker walks Soho with Joshua K Jackson, whose street work pairs rich, saturated reds with subjects that are rarely shown clearly. Jackson explains his form-driven idea of the curiosity gap, masking people with shadow, reflections and double exposures so viewers linger, likening it to a storyteller's slow punchline.

Frederik Trovatten configures his Fujifilm X-T3 for set-and-forget street shooting: auto ISO with a 1/250 minimum shutter and a 1600 ceiling, leaving aperture as the one dial he adjusts for depth of field. He suggests guessing Flickr photos' settings as practice, and metering for the bright side to keep highlights.

Mike Browne photographs author Alex Massey on a busy high street for PR images with a 55-200mm zoom, finding flattering light: leaving harsh sun for open shade and shadowless faces, isolating her against passers-by, shifting position to lose drainpipes behind her head, and shooting at 1/250 with raised ISO.

Brian Lloyd Duckett describes walk-around street settings prepared so he just presses the button: a 1/250 minimum shutter in daylight, a small aperture for front-to-back context, exposure compensation for fine-tuning, and manual zone focusing with a 35mm-equivalent at f/8 focused at nine feet, keeping five to thirty feet sharp.

Mike Chudley gives beginner street photography settings in manual mode: for daylight, 1/200 or faster, f/8 to f/16 for front-to-back sharpness, and ISO 100 to 300; for shallow depth of field, f/1.4 to f/3.5 and shutters towards 1/4000; and at night, 1/200 and a wider aperture, not extreme ISO.

Shane Taylor reviews Elliott Erwitt's Found, Not Lost, 171 unpublished images the 92-year-old selected from a 600,000-image archive, then explains why he favours 50mm for his sombre street work: a perspective close to human vision, putting viewers in his shoes, and a working distance respecting four feet of personal space.

Roman Fox argues light, not aperture, makes photographs three-dimensional: a subject at f/1.2 in flat light merges into the background since cameras cannot see depth. He recommends backlight or side light at 45 to 90 degrees for natural contrast and separation so strong he often lowers contrast in Lightroom.

Rupert Vandervell tackles grey-sky days with five approaches: think in black and white and build images around white, mid-grey and black tones; borrow mood from Alexey Titarenko's slow-shutter blur; shoot from dark underpasses towards the light; let mist hide backgrounds; and exploit the subtler reflections of dull conditions.