Go Slow, Go Fast: How to Ease Your Way into Street Photography with a 2-Step System

So you want to be a great street photographer.

You want to be able to strap your camera around your wrist and boldly walk down the streets, eagle-eyed and aware of everything around you, yet still in tune with your camera settings and its F-stops, its strengths and limitations. You want to visualize a moment happening and then capture it exactly as you saw it, to be preserved forever as a moment of history.

I’m not going to sugarcoat things; this is downright hard to do.

I’ve been doing street photography for almost 10 years and I struggle with it every single day. There are just so many competing and unanticipated aspects that all need to come together in unison for a great street photograph to work.

• You need to know your camera and its settings extremely well in different lighting situations and be able to switch between them constantly and quickly.
• You need to have catlike reflexes to frame and catch that split second moment.
• You need to be able to see that split second moment happening before it does.
• You often need to have the patience to park yourself in the right place, knowing that a special moment will eventually come.
• You need to be able to visualize yet still react.
• You need to tell stories and capture emotions.
• You need to be simultaneously creative and technical.

You will have to be persistent and learn to be hardheaded to get good. Sometimes you will see a moment and miss it. Other times your camera will be ready but you won’t see the moment until it is too late. Sometimes you will be too afraid to shoot quickly enough and will miss the moment by a split second. You will want to tear your hair out afterwards. It happens to all of us.
Street photography is a genre where you have to accept so many failures before you get that one success, where the captures can count in the thousands, while the great successes can be counted on your fingers and toes.
So let’s get down to it. What is the best way to start out? How do you take that first step into the vast pool of street photography and then set upon a path to improve and grow?

Start Slowly with a Medium/Long Zoom Lens

If you are a beginner, I think that the best way to start is to take your time, to be patient and to really think about what you are doing.


You don’t need to run out the door and take a thousand photos of everything that moves. You shouldn’t click the shutter constantly because you are afraid of missing the shot. The photographers that take the most shots of a subject are usually the ones that miss THE moment.


Try to anticipate when a moment will happen and capture the photo with a shot or two at the right point. Don’t be afraid to miss. You will miss sometimes, but the ones you hit will be way better than the hundreds of photos you will have otherwise taken that are almost there but not quite. Only worry about taking lots of photos if the scene starts to further develop.


After all, if you’re shooting constantly then you can’t actually see what’s happening.


Now I’m sure that you’ve already read (and I have personally written) about many different specific techniques, such as only using wide-angle primes, getting in close, shooting from the hip, using a long zoom or maybe even about popping up suddenly in front of someone’s face with a blinding flash (ala Bruce Gilden). Every street photographer shoots a little differently and there is no correct way to do it. You should eventually try out each technique.


I switch up my techniques constantly. It’s like that candy-bar commercial: “Sometimes you feel like a nut, sometimes you don’t.” I may always feel like a nut, but some days I wake up as a wide-angle prime lens man and others I feel like using a zoom. Often I use both.


But let’s get back to you. To start out, I think that you should use a zoom that has a little distance to it. You can try a 28-300, a 24-105, or even a 70-200.


Keep some distance from your subject. This will give you more time to see a moment happening, more time to anticipate a moment happening, more room to frame correctly and it will keep people from noticing you as much.