Tens of thousands of people run past you in this city every morning. A handful of spots put you in front of the ones most likely to pay for the photo.
What makes a running spot worth your Saturday
Scenery is the thing photographers optimize for and it is the least important variable. A profitable spot needs three things: enough runners passing a fixed point that you can shoot volume, close enough range that faces are identifiable, and runners who have a reason to want the picture. That last one is why an organized workout or a race beats a beautiful empty greenway every time.
Here are the places in New York that actually deliver all three, roughly in order of how reliably they pay.
1. Central Park, Engineers' Gate and Cat Hill
The 6.1 mile loop is the highest density running route in the country and thousands of people run it daily. You do not need to cover the loop. Pick a choke point and stay there.
Engineers' Gate at 90th Street and Fifth Avenue is where run clubs meet and where the Reservoir path feeds into the loop. Cat Hill on the East Drive gives you runners working uphill, which produces effort on faces instead of blank commuting expressions. The 1.5 mile Reservoir loop is flat, soft and packed with the same regulars at the same hour every day, which means repeat buyers.
Best time: 6:30am to 8:30am on weekdays, and Saturday mornings when long runs happen.
2. Prospect Park loop
The 3.3 mile loop is Brooklyn's version of the same thing at a friendlier scale. It is hilly, which again gives you effort, and it is the training ground for a large share of Brooklyn's run clubs. The lower density compared to Central Park is offset by a tighter community, where people recognize each other and photos get passed around group chats.
Best time: early weekday mornings and Saturday long run hours.
3. McCarren Park track and Astoria Park track
Public tracks are the single most underrated place to shoot runners for money. A track workout is repetitive by design, which means you get twenty attempts at the same frame instead of one. Runners come back to the same track every week. And crucially, people at a track are training on purpose, so they care about how they look doing it.
McCarren Park in Williamsburg is where a number of Brooklyn clubs run their sessions. Astoria Park has an outdoor track with the Hell Gate Bridge behind it, which is the rare case where the backdrop genuinely helps. East River Park and Riverbank State Park also have public tracks, which are scarce in this city.
Best time: weekday evenings, roughly 6pm to 8pm, when clubs run intervals.
4. The Brooklyn, Manhattan and Williamsburg bridges
Bridges give you a skyline behind a runner and a natural funnel, since everyone crosses on the same narrow path. The Brooklyn Bridge is the famous one and also the most difficult, because tourists clog the walkway for most of the day. Go at sunrise or skip it.
The Manhattan Bridge is the better working option, with similar views and far fewer people in the frame. The Williamsburg Bridge has a wide walkway and a serious approach hill that runners use for repeats, so you get the same person passing you several times.
Best time: sunrise, and the hour before sunset for the skyline behind them.
5. Brooklyn Bridge Park and the Hudson River Greenway
These are the golden hour locations. Brooklyn Bridge Park's piers put the Manhattan skyline and the bridge behind whoever is running toward you. The Hudson River Greenway runs almost 13 miles up the west side with clean separation between the running path and the bike lane, which matters more than it sounds when you are standing in the middle of it.
These spots produce the prettiest images on this list and convert less reliably than a track, because the runners are often solo and not expecting a camera. Shoot them when the light is worth it, not as your bread and butter.
6. Van Cortlandt Park in cross country season
This is the seasonal money spot most photographers miss. Van Cortlandt is the historic home of New York cross country, and from September through November it hosts meet after meet full of high school and college runners. The buyers here are not the athletes, they are the parents, and parents buy.
Get permission from the meet organizer or the school before you sell anything, since these are minors. That conversation is short and it is what separates you from the person shooting the same race with nothing to show for it.
7. Race days, starting with the marathon
The 2026 TCS New York City Marathon is Sunday, November 1. Around fifty thousand finishers, two million spectators, and the entire city paying attention. The Five Borough Series races through September and October give you smaller versions of the same thing across the Bronx, Staten Island and Queens, so check the NYRR calendar and pick the ones near you.
A word of caution on races. The organizer has an official photography partner and a set of rules about course access and commercial use. Shooting from the public sidewalk as a spectator is a different thing from working the course, and selling those images can run into the event's rules. Ask the organizer before the day rather than after.
Good spectator positions on the marathon course: the Pulaski Bridge at the halfway point, First Avenue in the 60s where the crowd noise hits, and the final stretch through Central Park.
Permits and what you are allowed to do
For most of what is described here you are one person with a camera on public property, which is the least regulated version of this. New York generally requires a permit when a shoot involves equipment beyond handheld, production vehicles, or exclusive use of city property, and permitted shoots must carry $1,000,000 in general liability insurance naming the city. A free optional permit exists for small handheld shoots.
Parks are the grey area. NYC Parks states that certain film and photo shoots on parks property may require a permit from the Mayor's Office of Media and Entertainment. If you are setting up regularly in the same park to sell images, call the borough permit office and ask rather than guessing. It is a five minute call that protects the location you depend on.
How to shoot these spots for actual sales
- Pick one fixed position and stay in it. Moving around gets you variety and no volume, and volume is what pays.
- Shoot faces, not silhouettes. A runner who cannot prove it is them will not buy it.
- Get the same person more than once. Multiple frames of one runner is what turns a single sale into a set.
- Note the exact location name and the date before you leave. Both are how people will look for the photos later.
- Publish the same day. Interest drops off fast once the run is over.
Getting paid without chasing people
The hard part of shooting strangers is that you have no way to reach them afterward. Rather than trying to find each runner, put the session somewhere they can find it themselves. Surf Snaps is one option built for that, with galleries organized by sport, location and date, so someone who ran Central Park on a given morning can search that and see what you shot.
One small step
Pick a Tuesday evening and go stand at one public track for an hour. Shoot every lap of every workout you see, get names for the location and the date, and post the set that night. It is the lowest effort test of this entire list, and it will tell you within a week whether you want to do more of it.
