Brick Lane rewards photographers who know what they are looking at. The street has absorbed one migrant community after another for three centuries: Huguenot silk weavers in the 1700s, whose loft-windowed houses still line the side streets towards Spitalfields; a Jewish community whose remaining trace is the 24-hour Beigel Bake; and from the 1970s the Bangladeshi community that gave the southern stretch its official name, Banglatown. The market itself dates to 1888.

That layering is the photographic subject. Curry house touts and vintage kids, market traders who have worked the same pitch for decades and tourists photographing everything — the frictions between these groups is where the pictures are.

Sclater Street is the best street photography on the Lane on a Sunday. Traders without formal stalls lay their goods out on carpets and tables — old tools, records, remote controls, whole boxes of unsorted everything. The buyers crouching, haggling and rummaging give you layered, busy frames that look like nothing else in London.

Cheshire Street runs east off the Lane: bric-a-brac stalls at the near end, then quieter terraced brick as you walk on. Follow it to Grimsby Street and the railway bridge towards Pedley Street — graffiti-covered, hard side light in the morning, and a constant trickle of characters using it as a cut-through.

The Bethnal Green Road end is stalls of prints, t-shirts and tourist goods: crowded, but visually generic. Shoot the buyers, not the stock.

The Truman Brewery area pulls the fashion crowd — strong for portraits and style-led frames. Note it is private property; be sensible and expect to be asked to stop if you set up conspicuously.

Beigel Bake, open around the clock, is the night picture: the queue at 1am under fluorescent light is a London institution.

Sunday between 11am and 3pm is shoulder-to-shoulder. Zone focus around 2 metres at f/8, pick a spot with good light or a strong background, and let the crowd flow through it — chasing individual subjects through a crush wastes the day.

Come at 8am instead and you get the other picture: traders unloading vans, carpets being unrolled on Sclater Street, tea in polystyrene cups, nobody performing for anyone. The light is lower and cleaner and the street still belongs to the people who work it.

Cameras are everywhere on Brick Lane, which works in your favour: nobody assumes you are photographing them specifically. The flip side is that traders are photographed constantly by people who buy nothing. If you work a stall for more than a frame or two, buy something small or at least talk to them. It keeps the street friendly for everyone who comes after you.