My go-to Canon R6 settings for Street Photography.
Settings can sometimes be confusing for beginners or even experienced photographers that haven’t had to adjust specific parameters of their cameras for specific situations. In this blogpost I will talk about what exposure triangle settings I use (shutter speed, aperture and ISO) and other settings like autofocus or burst modes. These can apply to many other genres of photography including event photography and isn’t particularly specific to the Canon EOS R6, most of these settings will work with most “R” model Canon’s and for some settings, all cameras. Note that my style isn’t an “Instagram banger” style shooting at f/1.8 and blurring everything out, I like to capture scenes!
Shutter speed, Aperture and ISO
This is obviously universal for all cameras! These settings of course depend on what I’m shooting, what time of day it is and if I want a desired effect like motion blur or silhouettes. My style of Street Photography is usually shot at a 35mm and occasionally a 50mm focal length during daylight hours, one of my main focuses are humans and I usually shoot them to fill the frame whilst keeping most of the surrounding scene in focus. The settings I use normally sit at; 1/500, F8 and Auto ISO. These settings for me freeze enough of the action and keep a lot of the scene in focus while not worrying about adjusting the ISO setting. Of course depending on light, I’d have to change it, when it’s really bright outside and in the direct sunlight, I typically push my f-stop to F10 but I normally won’t go past that as the lens can experience diffraction and the images won’t come out as sharp, so what do I do when it’s still over exposed? Well that’s when bumping up the shutter speed comes into play! Now on the opposite end, if it’s starting to get dark, I’ll alternate between dropping the shutter speed and opening my aperture as time goes on until it’s basically night time with a hard lowest limit of a shutter speed of 1/160, which then I’ll focus on just lowering my aperture to the widest setting, what I mean by this goes like this:
6pm light = SS 1/320, F8
6:30pm light = SS 1/320, F6.3
6:40pm light = SS 1/250, F6.3
6:50pm light = SS 1/250, F5.6
7pm light = SS 1/160 (my lowest limit), F5.6
7:10pm light = SS 1/160, F4
Now keep in mind that I use auto ISO and adjusting the other 2 settings is just me trying to minimize ISO, I’m actually very fine with having noise, in fact I love it in my images and I couldn’t care if my ISO was 6400, but adjusting these settings also keeps me on top of tracking the how much light there is, noise is fine but there’s no need for my ISO to be at 12800 if it’s blue hour and I can adjust other settings to minimize it. Now remember, the sunlight goes away at different times in different periods of the year in different parts of the world! As I said earlier, settings depend on multiple factors, if the area I’m shooting is quite energetic at 6:50pm, I may keep my shutter speed at 1/400 just in case something needs to be captured.
For night photography my style usually changes and I’d typically leave my aperture at the widest setting and adjust my shutter speed to the situation/scene while keeping an eye on my ISO as I keep it in auto even when it’s dark. However, don’t let noise stop you from capturing something, a unique, once in a lifetime shot with a lot of noise is better than not being able to capture any context at all!
Another thing to consider is my exposure compensation. Typically I set this to 0ev but if I want to play with light and shadows and take my time rather than run and gun I’ll under expose it.
Autofocus Settings
Autofocus is also an important setting and it always depends on situations! My usual style of run and gun while capturing people means I kind of need it to snap to humans or objects that are moving. For that I predominantly shoot in SERVO or for other cameras, Continuous AF or AF-C and with my focus area I stick to the whole focus area (wide) and have eye tracking enabled. However, if I’m camping a scene like the one above, I’ll change it to single point and place that AF point over where I want it in focus.
If I am shooting at a longer focal length, like 85mm and beyond, which is rare, I change my “Initial Servo AF point” to have an AF box before I focus by half pressing the shutter. What this does is it has a focus point that I can move around if I desire and when I half press the shutter button the AF will track whatever the AF point was on, basically acts like a selective tracking mode. You can find this in the menu, AF>Page 5>Initial Servo AF pt for (face and area icon). The setting at the top is for face and object (the point you start focusing on) tracking, the setting in the middle is just for tracking anything you start focusing on and the last one (Auto) is normally what I use and is what your camera is typically already set on. Having this tracking point is very useful especially if you also shoot events!
Burst and Other Settings
When I’m shooting my normal style I use electronic shutter and the highest burst mode (H+). This means I can be much more sneaky and leaves me with more options in post to get the moment that I like. However when I’m shooting longer focal lengths I’ll still use the highest burst speed but I’ll use mechanical shutter just because I love the sound of the shutter.
Hope someone can learn from this!
