Street Photography Assignments: 75 Reasons to Hit the Streets and Learn

Learn to train your eye and improve your timing in order to capture the decisive moment!

Whether it’s due to social media or the introduction of great rangefinder-style digital cameras over a decade ago, street photography has experienced a remarkable resurgence in recent years. You can be roaming the streets of a classic urban environment (New York, Paris, Tokyo) or on a simple photo walk around a quiet neighborhood — it has never been more popular to pursue the art of capturing those candid, fleeting moments that happen throughout the day, of freezing a moment in time and transforming the ordinary into an extraordinary photograph.

But learning to see light and moment, to make quick decisions, and to nail a photographic composition are all crucial skills you must master in order to become a good street photographer. Photographer, instructor, and author Valerie Jardin has been teaching photographers how to take better photographs for years, and in Street Photography Assignments: 75 Reasons to Hit the Streets and Learn, she provides dozens of prompts for you to practice in order to refine and improve your craft.

These activities focus on themes such as:

- Street portraits
- Gesture
- Shadows
- Silhouettes
- Rim light
- Humor
- Abstract
- Tension
- Motion
- Reflections
- Leading lines
- Creative framing
- Juxtapositions
- Double exposures
- And much, much more!

Each assignment includes a description of the technique, various tips and tricks to practice, technical and compositional considerations, and an example photo that Jardin has captured when practicing the same exercise. Whether you have 30 minutes or 3 hours, each assignment is an opportunity for you to take your camera and hit the streets. No more excuses!

About the Author:

Valérie Jardin is a French photographer, currently residing in Minneapolis, MN. She is self-taught and worked for several years as a commercial photographer. Today, Valérie is known internationally by the workshops she conducts around the world. When she is not teaching others the art of visual storytelling, Valérie is a prolific author, speaker, and podcast producer of the bi-weekly show Hit the Streets with Valérie Jardin. She lives and breathes in pixels.