Street Photography: "Who Cares Apertures"

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One of the cool things about street photography is that it's a blend of different styles. You can shoot environmental portraits on the street, urban landscapes or simply capture the ongoing show that happens in crowded areas.

From a technical point of view, street photography is best approached with a small camera because it allows you to keep a low profile and shoot candidly. The downside to most small cameras is that they don't have a very wide range of focal lengths. Ideally you want something that can go from wide to mid-tele, something like a 24-120mm zoom. Of course, that means you'll have to use a DSLR.

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Regardless of what camera you use for street photography, the concept of "who cares aperture" remains the same. A "who cares aperture" is a value anywhere between f/8, f/9, f/10 or f/11. The reason for the name is that these aperture sizes make very little difference in depth of field. Any of these values will work when you want to take a street portrait of someone close to a background, like a brick wall or a door.

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The upside to "who cares apertures" is that you'll most likely find your lens's "sweet spot" using them. That sweet spot is where maximum edge-to edge sharpness is achieved. Of course, we don't recommend using any of these values if you want to use depth of field to separate your subject from the background. For getting that nice-looking bokeh behind the subject, we recommend using values between f/1.4- f/4.

For anything else, just use a "who cares".

Here's Bryan Peterson in the field, as usual, demonstrating the use of "who cares apertures" in this video from Adorama TV.

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