Chapter 17 — Exercises

Street and documentary photography is learned on the street, with people who did not ask to be in your frame — so most of these exercises send you out to shoot, and several ask you to think hard about ethics before you press the shutter. A phone is an ideal tool here: small, quiet, and already in your pocket. Difficulty is marked ⭐ (warm-up), ⭐⭐ (core), ⭐⭐⭐ (stretch). Do the starred and odd-numbered ones at minimum; model answers and critiques for those are in the book's Answers to Selected Exercises. Before every exercise involving strangers, re-read §17.3 and run the gut-check (Figure 17.3). Keep what you shoot — some of it feeds your Portfolio.

Part A — Reading the frame (Read the Frame)

Exercise 17.1 ⭐ — Name the three materials. Find five street or documentary photographs (a book, a museum site, a photographer's portfolio — not your own). For each, write one sentence naming which of the three raw materials — light, gesture, juxtaposition — is doing the most work, and which (if any) second material supports it. Fluency, not depth.

Exercise 17.2 ⭐⭐ — The two-material test. From the same set, find the one image where at least two materials clearly stack (e.g. a gesture caught in strong light, or a juxtaposition with a gesture). Write a short paragraph explaining how the two materials reinforce each other and what the frame would lose if either were removed.

Exercise 17.3 ⭐⭐ — Write a Described Photograph of a street frame. Choose one strong street photograph and write a full Described Photograph of it using the six fields (THE FRAME / THE LIGHT / THE MOMENT / THE CHOICES / THE EFFECT / THE LESSON). Be specific enough about the moment that a reader could tell exactly what instant was chosen and why a fraction earlier or later would have failed.

Exercise 17.4 ⭐⭐⭐ — Find the background, name the wait. Find a street photograph where the photographer clearly found a background and waited for a person to complete it (a sign, a poster, a shaft of light, a graphic shape). Describe the background half — the part the photographer controlled — and the human half they waited for. Then describe, in words, the near-miss frames they probably threw away (person in the wrong spot, no gesture, bad timing).

Part B — The reactive setup (Settings Drill)

Exercise 17.5 ⭐ — Write the bright-day street exposure. You are on a sunny street, shooting people walking. Write a complete starting exposure (mode, aperture, shutter, ISO, focus method, metering, white balance) for reactive shooting, and justify each choice in a few words. Then state what you would change if a cloud rolled in and the light dropped two stops.

Exercise 17.6 ⭐⭐ — Set the zone. You are shooting at f/8 and want everyone between about 2 and 5 metres to be sharp without autofocus. Explain, in plain language, how you would set up zone focusing to achieve that, what would happen to the zone if you stopped down to f/16, and what would happen if you opened up to f/4. Then explain how you would accomplish the same effect on a phone.

Exercise 17.7 ⭐⭐ — Noise vs. blur vs. miss: defend the trade. The light has dropped and you cannot keep 1/500 s at f/8 without ISO 6400. A friend says "ISO 6400 is too noisy — just use 1/125 s." Write the argument for keeping the fast shutter and accepting the noise, in terms of what each failure mode (noise, motion blur, missed moment) actually costs on the street.

Exercise 17.8 ⭐⭐⭐ — The dim-interior pivot. You move from a bright street into a dim covered market. Rewrite your entire reactive setup for the new light, naming every setting you change and why, and decide whether zone focusing still works (and at what aperture/distance) or whether you switch to autofocus. State the highest ISO you would accept and your reasoning.

Part C — Working the street (Shoot This)

Exercise 17.9 ⭐ — The zone-focus hour. Do the in-chapter field assignment from §17.2 formally. Pre-set f/8, 1/500 s, Auto ISO, manual focus at ~3 m (or phone focus-lock), and shoot one hour at a busy intersection or market without adjusting focus and without chimping. Shoot 80+ frames. Keep three where focus and timing landed, and write one sentence on what changed in your seeing once the technical dropped away.

Exercise 17.10 ⭐⭐ — Light first: wait for the stage. Find a patch of strong directional light on a public street (a beam between buildings, a bright doorway, a reflected pool of light). Set your exposure for that light, frame it, and wait for a person to walk into it. Make at least 30 frames over 20–30 minutes. Keep the two where a human and the light coincided best. You are photographing the light and waiting for a subject — note how that inverts your usual habit.

Exercise 17.11 ⭐⭐ — Find the juxtaposition. Locate a strong fixed background element with built-in meaning (a billboard, a sign with words, a mural, a "ONE WAY" arrow). Frame it, then wait for a person whose position, gesture, or appearance comments on it. Make 20+ frames. Keep the one where the relationship between person and background creates a meaning neither had alone. This is the hardest and most rewarding street skill.

Exercise 17.12 ⭐⭐⭐ — Shoot from the hip. For 30 minutes, shoot only without raising the camera to your eye — frame loosely from waist or chest level (use a tilting screen, or just point and trust a wide lens). The goal is to compose by instinct and to work even less obtrusively. Most frames will fail; that is expected. Keep the two that surprised you, and note what hip-shooting did to your framing and your nerves.

Part D — The decisive moment, on the street (Five Conditions / anticipation)

Exercise 17.13 ⭐⭐ — One corner, five moments. Pick a single fixed vantage at a busy spot and stay there for 30–45 minutes, working the same composition as different people and moments pass through it. Make at least five genuinely different frames of the same stage — different gestures, different juxtapositions, different timing. Self-select the best three and write why each beats the others. (This is the street version of the "five conditions" drill: the stage is fixed; the human variable changes.)

Exercise 17.14 ⭐⭐⭐ — Anticipate, don't react. Find a repeating situation you can predict (people leaping a puddle, stepping off a curb, reaching a turnstile, greeting each other at a meeting spot). Watch it cycle several times without shooting, learn its rhythm, then shoot — releasing at the peak you have learned to see coming. Make 40 frames across many cycles. Keep the two with the best timing and compare them to your first, reactive attempts to feel the difference anticipation makes.

Part E — Approaching strangers (Shoot This / nerve)

Exercise 17.15 ⭐ — Script your approach. Before you go out, write out, word for word, the sentence you will use to ask a stranger for a portrait — direct, warm, and with a specific genuine reason rooted in the picture ("the light on you," "your hat against that wall"). Say it aloud five times until it feels natural. (No camera yet; this is preparation for 17.16.)

Exercise 17.16 ⭐⭐ — Ask five strangers. Do the §17.5 nerve exercise. Approach five strangers and ask for a portrait, using your specific reason each time. Pre-set your camera; make two or three frames of each person who says yes; get eye contact; offer to send the photo. Count your yeses. Keep the strongest portrait. The goal is to ask five times and discover the fear was larger than the reality.

Exercise 17.17 ⭐⭐ — Candid and consented, same person-type. Make two portraits of the same kind of subject (e.g. two market vendors, two musicians) — one a candid, shot unobtrusively, and one an asked-for, eye-contact portrait. Put them side by side and write what each mode captured that the other could not. Decide which you would keep for your portfolio and why.

Exercise 17.18 ⭐⭐⭐ — Send it back. Make a consented portrait of a stranger and actually deliver the photo to them (email, message, print). Reflect in a paragraph on how the act of closing the loop changed the encounter and your sense of responsibility to the people you photograph. This is craft and ethics in one.

Part F — Ethics and judgment (Fix the Situation)

Exercise 17.19 ⭐ — Run the gut-check. Take three street frames you have already shot (or three you can imagine shooting) of identifiable people and run each through the five-question gut-check (Figure 17.3): punching up/down, dignity, vulnerability, truth, would-I-trade-places. Write the result for each and whether you would shoot, keep, or publish it.

Exercise 17.20 ⭐⭐ — Legal vs. ethical vs. kind. For each of these described situations, decide separately whether it is likely legal, whether it is ethical, and whether it is kind — and explain any case where the three diverge: (a) photographing a street performer mid-act; (b) a tight candid of an unhoused person asleep, shot for a "gritty" frame; (c) photographing a child at a public playground without the parent's awareness; (d) photographing a stranger's house through their open front window from the public sidewalk.

Exercise 17.21 ⭐⭐⭐ — Fix the cruel frame. You are handed a technically excellent street photograph that mocks its subject (it makes a struggling person look ridiculous for a clever picture). It is perfectly legal. Write what is wrong with it in ethical terms, then describe a different photograph of a similar subject — same difficulty, same honesty — that would document the situation with dignity instead of at the person's expense. Name what changes between the two.

Part G — The documentary project (Shoot This / project)

Exercise 17.22 ⭐⭐ — Gather the shot list. Choose one place near you to document. On a single visit, consciously gather all five frame types from the photo-essay anatomy (Figure 17.4): an establishing wide, a close portrait, a telling detail, an interaction, and at least one attempt at the moment. Do not edit; just gather. Label each frame by its type.

Exercise 17.23 ⭐⭐⭐ — Return three times. Take the subject from 17.22 and revisit it at least three times this month, building trust and gathering the shot list each visit. After the third visit, lay out everything and identify the one frame that the later visits made possible — the one a stranger on the first visit could never have gotten. Write why return, not technique, produced it. (This may become your Portfolio human-story keeper, and the seed of your Chapter 38 essay.)

Part H — Editing the take (Fix the Photo / selection)

Exercise 17.24 ⭐ — The cooling-off cull. Take a street session you shot at least a day ago. Do a fast, brutal first pass: flag only the frames that make you stop, cutting at least 90% without agonizing. Count how many you started with and how many survived. Write one sentence on how the day's distance changed what you kept.

Exercise 17.25 ⭐⭐ — Kill your darling. Find one frame in your take that you love because of the story behind it but that does not actually work as a photograph (a stranger looking at it would not be moved). Cut it, and write a short, honest paragraph on why the memory does not transfer to the viewer and why the rectangle has to stand alone.

Exercise 17.26 ⭐⭐⭐ — Edit to two. From a session of at least 150 frames, run the full §17.6 method (cool, fast pass, compare duplicates, cold question) and arrive at exactly two keepers. Write a paragraph defending each survivor — timing, sharpness, single clear subject, the material (light/gesture/juxtaposition) that earns it — and one sentence on the strongest frame you cut and why it didn't make it.

Part I — Eye Training (the Light Log, no camera)

Exercise 17.27 ⭐ — The street-light entry. Add a Light Log entry (the practice from Chapter 5) focused on a public space: stand at a busy spot and note, without shooting, where the good light falls, at what hour, and where a person would have to stand to be lit by it. You are scouting a stage for a future shoot.

Exercise 17.28 ⭐⭐ — Ten minutes of unmade photographs. Stand at a busy corner for ten minutes and do not raise a camera. Instead, count and jot down every photograph that forms and dissolves before you could react — the gestures, the juxtapositions, the moments of light. Aim to notice at least eight. This trains the seeing that readiness later lets you act on.

Part J — Interleaved (mixing prior chapters)

Exercise 17.29 ⭐⭐ — Compose the chaos (Ch.6). Make one street frame in which you deliberately use a Chapter 6 composition tool — leading lines, the rule of thirds, framing, or negative space — to give a busy, cluttered scene a single clear subject. Name the tool you used and how it subordinated the clutter.

Exercise 17.30 ⭐⭐ — Read the light backward (Ch.5). For three street photographs (yours or others'), deduce from the shadows and highlights alone: where was the light coming from, was it hard or soft, and what time of day was it likely shot? Tie your reasoning to the four light questions from Chapter 5.

Exercise 17.31 ⭐⭐⭐ — Depth of field as a street tool (Ch.4). Make two candid frames of the same kind of scene: one at f/8 (deep zone, everything sharp, the documentary look) and one at f/2.8 (shallow, subject isolated from a busy background, the lyrical look). Compare what each aperture says about the subject and decide which the scene wanted. Connect your answer to depth of field from Chapter 4.

Exercise 17.32 ⭐⭐⭐ — The decisive moment, revisited (Ch.10). Recreate the spirit of Figure 17.1 (the leap over the puddle): find a place where a reflection, a poster, or a graphic background could rhyme with a passing person, pre-set focus and exposure, and wait for the one instant the human and the background align. Make 30+ frames. Keep the single best and write why it is the decisive moment and not the moment before or after.

Stretch challenge

Exercise 17.33 ⭐⭐⭐ — A week on one street. For seven days, photograph the same public street or block, returning at different hours. Each day: one Light Log entry, and a short reactive session with everything pre-set. At week's end, edit the whole week down to a sequenced set of five frames that, in order, say something about that place and its people — an establishing frame, two or three in the middle, and a closer. You will have made, in miniature, the documentary photo essay that Chapter 38 builds in full — and quite possibly your Portfolio keeper.

Model answers and critiques for the starred and odd-numbered exercises appear in the book's "Answers to Selected Exercises." Try each with a camera — and, for the ethics exercises, with your conscience — before reading them. In street photography, the attempt, the encounter, and the edit are the lesson.