Street photography hack – Sony Auto ISO Minimum Shutter Speed

Use Sony ISO AUTO Min. Shutter speed to up your street photography game

Cruicial to street photography is having a shutter speed that is fast enough to capture the fast moving action that can happen at a blink’s notice. Your camera may tend to prefer slower shutter speeds such as 1/60s when shooting in A mode (aperture priority) which a lot of people prefer to do. Unfortunately, 1/60s is typically too slow for photographing moving people. 

A more ideal setting is 1/125s or faster but how do you get this in A mode? Easy!

Use the ISO AUTO Min. SS setting which all modern cameras should have.

What this will do is force the camera to never go below 1/125s shutter speed in modes like A when using ISO AUTO!

How it does this is by raising the ISO to meet the exposure requirements. Whereas before your camera would lower ISO (preferring lower noise) over shutter speed – terrible for street photography. Now, modern cameras can typically take fairly high ISO shots so your quality isn’t going to be noticeably worse for 99% of your photos – especially if before, your camera was doing a 200 ISO shot at 1/60s instead of say 400 ISO at 1/125s.

Where to find ISO AUTO Min. Shutter Speed in Sony Menu on A7RII (yours may be different)
Where to find ISO AUTO Min. Shutter Speed in Sony Menu on A7RII (yours may be different)

So in a nutshell, use this setting to get the shot. If your shots have a lot of blurry photos, this setting is perfect for you. I use a bunch of different settings but if you want a quick 1 setting fits all so you can focus on actually taking photos, use this:

Night street photography quick settings

Shooting Mode – A
F-stop – ideally 2.8 or lower (smaller number is better, otherwise as low as you can get)
ISO – AUTO
ISO AUTO Min SS – 1/125

If you find that 1/125 is not enough, feel free to increase the value. How high you set it is dependant on your gear and what quality of your photos you want.

Note this will not work in M mode (manual). If you want to lower shutter speed for whatever reason then swapping to M mode might be a better option so you can leave ISO AUTO Min. SS on and not have to fuss going through the menu every time you want to shoot slower.