West Coast Street Photography: The Best Cities
If you’ve spent any amount of time as a street photographer in the United States, you’ve probably spent a lot of time thinking about places like New York City and Chicago.
The West Coast is great, sure, but certainly more famous for its mountains, national parks, coastline, and weather than for any kind of metropolitan appeal. I love the outdoors too, but I’m a street photographer at heart.
Over the last few years of full-time travel, I’ve found myself coming back to the big West Coast hubs again and again, so after spending most of 2025 retracing the entire coastline, this feels like the perfect moment to look back and break down what each city offers us street photographers.
Whether you’re planning a visit, daydreaming about the West Coast, or you’ve lived in one of these cities your whole life, here’s an honest, experience-driven guide to what makes each one special.
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Portland: Weird, Green, Under-Appreciated
Portland is a strange little blend of mid-size-city accouterment and unapologetic weirdness.
It feels like a small town that accidentally grew into a city. Everyone’s friendly, everything’s green, and the whole place feels like a community more than a big anonymous city.
Portland isn’t the most obvious street photography spot. Foot traffic is sparse, and a lot of the downtown areas can feel pretty empty. But if you time your walks around peak hours, you’ll find pockets of activity.
Even if you don’t, the liminal emptiness and quiet can make for incredibly atmospheric photos, too.
The city revolves around the Willamette River, but the bridges are where the personality really shows. None of them match. Some are old and industrial, others sleek and modern. They all make for excellent set decoration in a street photography scene, and tell your viewer exactly where the shot was taken.
If you want underappreciated and rewarding, Portland delivers. Also, don’t miss the coffee or the craft beer scene if that’s your thing (it’s definitely mine), and leave time to visit Pine State Biscuits at least a handful of times.
Seattle: Shiny & Modern, With Texture Underneath
Seattle feels like a bigger, shinier city, with glass towers, tech campuses, and polished edges in many places.
But underneath it all is a distinct and undeniable blue-collar maritime energy that seems to push back against all the change. It’s a port city at its core, and once you zero in on that, the whole place starts to make more sense.
Tech companies come and go, but fish and freight? Fish and freight are forever.
Pike Place Market is unmissable. The heartbeat of downtown, and yes, I know it’s a tourist trap, but I also consider it to be maybe the best tourist trap in the country.
Everything funnels down to it, and if you’re into photographing people, this is where Seattle shines. The waterfront, Belltown, Chinatown, Pioneer Square, and even around the Space Needle, another of Seattle’s super-touristy spots, are all surprisingly rich for subject-focused street photography.
It’s funny, I’d say you shouldn’t only shoot the Pike Place Market, but the market alone makes Seattle worth a visit for dedicated street photographers.
San Francisco: NYC of the West Coast
San Francisco is nothing short of beautiful. It’s the “New York of the West Coast”: dense, walkable, layered, and endlessly photogenic.
Chinatown alone could keep you shooting for days. I’ve eaten some of my favorite meals there as well, but do be respectful of people going about their lives in that area.
It is a heavily trafficked and photographed part of the city. Street photography is about documenting candidly, sure, but empathy and personal space go a long way in a place that deserves to be treated like a neighborhood, not an attraction.
The rest of the city is just as much fun to photograph. North Beach, the Embarcadero, the piers, the waterfront, the Mission, all of SF’s signature hills with their sweeping views. Everything is visually rich and dripping with texture and color, especially if you’re lucky enough to be graced with one of those dream-like, hazy sunsets.
Robust public transit continues to set it apart from the rest of the West Coast, and also means that there are simply more people walking, riding, crossing, waiting, and otherwise about. Add the city’s constantly shifting weather, fog, muted light, the occasional grey drizzle, and you get this atmospheric, textured canvas that’s perfect for street photography.
Even the quieter residential neighborhoods make for great photo walks. You truly have to work to take a bad photo in San Francisco.
Los Angeles: Endless Possibility
I’ve spent more time in LA than anywhere else on the West Coast, and it’s become one of my favorite cities to live, not just to photograph.
The big downside is obvious: everything is spread out, and you’re married to your car. You can drive 50 miles without ever leaving “Los Angeles”, though people tend to draw the boundary lines inconsistently, and there’s much debate over where LA proper begins and ends.
For the purposes of this blog, we’re talking about everything from the San Fernando Valley to Long Beach.
A lot can change, and change quickly, in this vast, sprawling, palm-tree-accented swath of desert, but when you find the neighborhood that speaks to you? LA becomes a street photographer’s dream.
It has the most diverse shooting environments of any city on this side of the country, maybe even in the states.
Touristy spots like Venice Beach, Hollywood Boulevard, and Santa Monica Pier offer endless subjects and constant motion. More laid-back areas like Los Feliz and Silver Lake give you relaxed, neighborhood scenes that come alive at night. Downtown LA has its own rhythm, with hidden gems around Santee Alley, the fashion district, the markets, and those wide, cinematic streets.
LA is also the easiest place to meet other photographers. There’s a staggeringly large creative community, constant meetups, and a steady flow of people doing interesting work. If you want to shoot, collaborate, or just wander around with a camera, LA always has something happening.
Final Thoughts
The imminent future is taking me in a different direction, and it might be a long time before I make my way back to some of these places. A few of them I’ve probably even seen for the last time for a while.
But that’s the nature of the beast. The world is massive, and there’s too much out there to keep looping through the same places forever.
Still, I’m grateful I got one more chance to run around the coastline this year. The West Coast has shaped a lot of my work, and these cities have given me countless moments I’ll never forget. If you’re heading out this way with a camera, I hope this look at Portland, Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles helps you find your own favorite spots.
