Our easy 3 step Bus spotting guide

A helping hand (or start) to spotting our buses!

Whether you’re a keen bus-spotter, general transport enthusiast or you're looking for a new hobby, our easy peasy 3 step bus spotting guide is a great place to start! 

Bus spotting is a great way for you to express your love of buses, knowledge and a great hobby to show off your artwork - which may include thousands of pictures of buses head on, turning, in profiles and maybe even from above (if you get really creative!)

Planning ahead

Planning your day is key. There are a few things to think about before planning the day ahead.

Location - where will you be going to find and picture buses?
There are many great places situated around the West Midlands for bus spotting. For example, Moor Street is a great place to picture buses travelling past the iconic Bullring & Grand Central. Castle Hill in Dudley is picture perfect for capturing Black Country buses riding past the Dudley Zoo and Castle. In Coventry, Whittle Arch makes an iconic backdrop to any bus spotting picture. Local highstreets are another great place to pitch for a few hours, capturing your local buses on your local high street.

Timings - busy, quiet, daytime vs night time

Timing is a vital point to bus spotting, even though there are many timing aspects to think about. Do you want to picture or find the bus during a busy period of the day, with lots of background noise, or are you after something within the sunset golden hour, with less traffic and people? 

Timing is also something that plays a key role when picturing the bus. Timing your photo to get the best angles for your bus spotting portfolio is important. Do you want a head on shot, a shot of the bus turning or is there another important timing point you need to consider for capturing that key image?

Buses - Platinum, electric, hydrogen or heritage livery?

We have a very big fleet of buses for you to spot - from new state of the art hydrogen buses, down to our heritage livery fleet. Not sure on where to start, or what to look for?

West Midlands Buses In Photographs website has a very comprehensive list of buses and fleet numbers, as well as a large collection of photographs.

West Midlands bus users website has an online chart of all known bus allocations for our bus services, which some bus spotters may find useful!

Picture perfect

With all your planning all done, this is our favourite part - finding and picturing the buses!

Make sure that on the day, you have plenty of battery and film for capturing that golden moment. There are many ways you can capture or film our buses, but please do be mindful of the drivers and passengers onboard them.

Share, share, share!

Don’t forget to share your work with the bus community and on social platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Sharing your findings with other bus spotting enthusiasts and ourselves can really help get your images and creations out there!

We love being tagged into your bus finds. Which one is your favourite? And if you love buses as much as we do, why not check out UK Buses filled with plenty of information about bus fleets across the UK!