Street Photography Part 5; Settings and Technical Issues

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I suppose most of you are familiar with the settings of a SLR camera. If not i advice you to read my post about these basic technical issues; aperture, shutter, exposure, depth of field

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In street photography you should be fast to capture the pictures of right moments therefore you should use a fast shutter speed and reletively fast ISO. Actually using low ISO values like 100 is better to have less grain/noise in the picture but in the evening when shadows of buildings cover the street it is hard to take clear shots without a tripod at this point i advice you to switch you ISO value to be able to use faster shutter speeds. In such conditions 400 ISO should be ideal, but if it isn’t use something like 800. But remember increasing ISO will also increase the size of the grain in your film or level of noise if you are using a DSLR. In sum, in the evening and early morning hours it is better to use fast ISO speeds like 400, and to get pictures with less grain use ISO 100 during the day.

As i said to capture the right moments on time, fast shutter speeds are preferred in street photography. For example 1/125 sec. will be enough to freeze the action. But if you want to give the feeling of motion, you can use slower shutter speeds, like i did in “Frozen in Time”. Actually as long as there’s enough light in the environment, using aperture priority mode (Av in Canon cameras) of your camera will be a good choice.

I prefer to use medium aperture between f/4 and f/8 in street photography. These aperture settings both let the photographer be fast in daylight and give enough depth of field range to avoid focus problems. As you know the lower f values such as f/4 , f/2.8 etc. lets more light into the camera therefore increase the speed of shutter. Also as the f number decreases, depth of field range gets narrower which lets you isolate the subject from background.

I don’t know is it true to give exact numbers as if they are rules. Indeed there’s no “right” settings, since they change according to each camera, film, lens, environment. The numbers and i’m writing here are just commonly used approximate numbers for the settings. Don’t forget to try different settings, angles and compositions…