150+ Street Photography Ideas & Assignments

Set your flash to manual.

Set your shutter to 1/15 or slower.

Find Multiple Exposure in your camera's shooting menu (most mirrorless bodies have it).

Pick a colour before you leave the house.

Set your focus to a fixed distance - 2 metres is a good street distance.

Camera at waist height, zone focused (see zone focusing card), shooting blind or with a rough sense of aim.

You spot a good background - a colourful wall, strong light, an interesting doorway, a gap in a crowd.

Before you look for subjects, look for backgrounds.

Puddles, shop windows, car bonnets, mirrored buildings, sunglasses.

Backlighting creates silhouettes, rim light, lens flare, haze.

Rain does several things at once: it empties the streets of people who don't need to be there, it creates reflections on every surface, it adds mood a…

Find strong directional light - low sun, a narrow alley, a shaft through a gap in buildings.

Place your subject to one side of the frame.

Street photography flattens three-dimensional space into two dimensions.

Doorways, windows, arches, tunnels, gaps in crowds, car windows.

Match your camera movement to a moving subject - a cyclist, a bus, someone running.

High ISO - 3200, 6400, higher.

This is the backbone of editorial street photography.

Spend a session shooting only vertically.

Approach someone and ask to photograph them where they are - behind their market stall, outside their shop, sitting on their doorstep.

Slow sync combines a slow shutter with flash.

The decisive moment (Cartier-Bresson's idea) is about anticipation - reading the scene, predicting the peak, pressing the shutter at exactly the right…

A longer focal length - 85mm to 135mm equivalent - lets you work from a distance.

Set an alarm. Be out before 6am. The streets are empty or nearly so. The light is soft and low. The people who are out at that hour - cleaners, delive…

Shop windows, bus windows, café windows, phone box glass.

Don't wait for a gap. Shoot through people. Let them partially obstruct your subject. Heads and shoulders in the foreground create depth and atmospher…

Large shop windows backlight subjects standing outside them.

Two approaches. One: step back and include vast architecture, empty space, or landscape. Your subject becomes a figure in a world - small, contextuali…

Pedestrian crossings hold people still for 30 to 60 seconds.

Strong architectural lines - pillars, arches, staircases, underpasses, brutalist grids - give you ready-made composition.

Sit somewhere public for ten minutes before you shoot.

Sometimes a series of frames from one scene tells a story no single image can.

When shooting for black and white, expose to crush the shadows and blow highlights deliberately.

Something is happening - a performance, an argument, an accident, a spectacle.

Comedy on the street comes from incongruity - the wrong person in the wrong place, the sign that means something different in context, the accidental…

Advertising, graffiti, road signs, shop names, van signage, estate agents' boards - the street is full of text.

One person dressed differently from everyone else.

You're focused on one person.

Someone in a suit at a car boot sale.

You've photographed someone.

Slow shutter - 1/15 or slower.

Streets are full of lines — pavements, railings, lamp posts, road markings, kerbs, shopfronts, shadows.

Candid is not the same as shooting from the hip.

Dense, colourful, layered.

Brick Lane contains multitudes - Bangladeshi restaurants, vintage markets, street art, brunch queues, market traders, tourists, locals who've been the…

The South Bank is a stage.

A long tunnel beneath Waterloo station, legally graffitied from floor to ceiling.

One of London's most photogenic areas and consistently underused by street photographers.

Martin Parr has photographed here.

One of London's oldest street markets.

Antiques, fruit and veg, vintage clothing, tourists, locals.

One of London's great working markets.

Peckham has been changing for a decade and the tension between old and new is still very much present.

Deptford Market on the high street is one of London's most photogenic and least photographed markets.

Kingsland Road and the streets around it.

Roman Road Market, the green itself, the mix of Bangladeshi community, long-term East End residents, and newer arrivals.

Every Sunday morning, a narrow Victorian street becomes a riot of flowers, crowds, and theatre.

Old Compton Street, Berwick Street Market, the alleys and courts, the surviving sex shops and music venues alongside the restaurants and bars.

Not usually recommended and that's exactly why you should go.

Brixton Market, the covered arcades (Market Row and Brixton Village), the station, the high street.

Greenwich Market, the town centre, the park, the tourists at the Observatory.

Post-Olympic Stratford is a study in regeneration.

Bermondsey Street, Maltby Street Market (weekend mornings), the Blue Market.

One of London's great ongoing demolitions and reconstructions.

Claims to be the longest outdoor market in Europe.

The Barbican Estate is one of the most photographically rich environments in London for architecture-led street photography.

Artists' studios, canal, warehouses, the Olympic Park boundary.

The last surviving wholesale meat market in central London.

Whitechapel Road, Whitechapel Market, the Royal London Hospital, the Bangladeshi community.

Old Spitalfields Market, Brushfield Street, the streets around Christ Church.

Camden Market, the Lock, the High Street, the canal.

A Roman city with a cathedral, a market, independent shops, and the kind of middle-class English high street that Parr would have photographed immedia…

A proper working town with a diverse population, a market, and a high street that hasn't entirely surrendered to the chains.

A small county town with a castle, independent shops, the River Lea.

Stevenage is best known as Britain's first post-war new town.

A new town with an old town nearby (Old Hatfield, with Hatfield House behind it).

A new town with a genuinely strange road system and a pedestrianised old high street alongside the new town centre.

A town that feels more like outer London than Hertfordshire.

Both are small market towns on the River Lea.

One of Hertfordshire's most attractive market towns.

A prosperous market town with a high street and the kind of middle-England Saturday-morning life that's pure Parr territory.

A long, linear high street with independent shops, a castle ruin, the canal.

Both border towns between Hertfordshire and the Lee Valley.

Both are early 20th century garden cities - planned, leafy, slightly strange.

Martin Parr's spiritual home, practically.

One of the largest outdoor markets in the south of England.

Britain's oldest recorded town.

Essex county town. A market, a cathedral, a high street, a large shopping centre. The everyday county town quality of it is the appeal - this is not a…

A proper British seaside resort in decline and proud of it.

A post-war new town. The town centre is pedestrianised and has the quality of all post-war new towns - ambition that's aged in interesting ways. The m…

A port town with a historic old quarter and a working ferry terminal.

Grays has a market and a high street that the rest of the country has largely ignored.

Epping is a small market town.

A small island accessible by causeway, known for oysters and a working fishing community.

Pick one focal length and use nothing else for thirty days.

Return to the same location, every month, for twelve months.

Every frame must contain your chosen colour.

Document it before it goes.

Ask. See what happens.

Specifically British. Specifically strange.

Everyone on their phone, everywhere.

Go when no one else does.

Skin as autobiography.

Rain, wind, frost, and the people who carry on regardless.

No faces. Just hands.

The display and the reflection.

The British pub as a social document.

Every market, everywhere, for a year.

Document the daily migration.

They always look like each other.

Churches next to betting shops.

Housing estates as community, not as problem.

Everything for sale. Everything has a story.

The conversation between old and new.

Churches, mosques, temples, gurdwaras.

8am and 3:30pm. Everywhere, every weekday.

Cold water, British stoicism.

December. Everywhere.

One night. All of it.

Early morning clearing up.

The performance and the audience.

What people are angry about, and how.

Coincidental clothing.

Village fetes, school fairs, birthday parties in public.

What we throw away.

The goods, the volunteers, the customers.

With permission. Inside.

Waiting and watching.

With permission. The ritual of it.

Late night. Hungry people.

Amateur football, parks, 10am.

With permission. The quiet ones.

The other side of Britain.

Eggleston in Essex.

The uncanny doubles.

The gap between the language and the building.

'Believe in yourself' in a job centre.

It's real. Document it.

Candid, contextual, honest.

The suspended moment.

Last service. Everyone on it.

A dedicated humour project.

People who don't want to be photographed but haven't said no.

Outside every pub, office, and hospital.

Sell the bag. Keep one body and one lens. Use them for everything for twelve months.

Approach 100 strangers and ask to photograph them.

Straight out of camera.

Shoot exclusively in black and white for one month.

Choose one famous photograph.

Starting points. Adjust from here.

Set it and forget it.

On a sunny day: set aperture to f/16, shutter speed to 1/ISO.

Auto ISO is not a crutch.

Short answer: either works.

Modern cameras handle high ISO well.

By default, half-pressing the shutter activates autofocus.

Most modern cameras offer both.

Fujifilm's film simulations are designed to replicate the colour response of specific Fujifilm films.

Most serious cameras offer custom shooting modes — slots (C1, C2, C3 on the dial, or banks) that save a complete configuration: aperture, ISO, shutter…