Street Photography: Choosing your Focal Length (85mm, 50mm, 35mm, 28mm)

this video is sponsored by mpb what focal length you choose for your street photography matters because if you find that focal length that you like that is the way that you see the world that helps you to tell the stories that you want to tell and then you run the thread of that focal length through your work it really gives some consistency to your visual voice this advice won't apply as much to those of you who prefer to go into the street and shoot with a zoom lens and of course there's nothing wrong with that if you like to change your focal length on the fly but I'm going to guess that even those of you who choose to shoot on a zoom tend to gravitate towards one or the other end of those focal lengths that you have in that lens and there might be something to pay attention to in that there is a rough trajectory to the focal length Journey that I went on as I experimented with different lenses trying to work out which fit me best and I thought that today by sharing that Journey with you and the lessons that I learned along the way it will help those of you who are struggling to work this out to find which focal length fits your way of seeing and capturing the world so I started shooting street photography on an Eddie five mil focal length there was a very simple reason for that it's the only lens I owned the story went that I went in to buy my first DSLR which was a Canon 350d back in the day but unfortunately the camera store at the time only had the bodies in stock they didn't have any of the 18 to 55 mil kit lenses available but the helpful guy in the camera store said don't worry and he reached behind him and he picked off the shelf a secondhand Canon 50mm F 1.4 and he said to me take this we'll give you a good price on it you'll absolutely love it then I was a real Noob at the time I didn't know whether it was a good lens or exactly what it would do for me but I bought it and that's what I walked out with my 350d and a Canon 50mm F 1.4 most of you will know that when you team a 50mm lens with an aps-c sensor as was in the 350d you get a roughly 85 mil focal length equivalent so I started to go around and take images with it and I loved how I could pick out individual subjects and that F 1.4 gave me a lot of options for throwing the background round out of focus with a shallow depth of field and really isolating subjects so as I photograph my friends or my daily wonderings I love this ability to be able to hone in on one very specific thing to pick out details and separate them from the background which would just become that kind of creamy bokeh 85 mil or even longer is a perfectly legit focal length for street photography and many photographers use it to great effect making creative use of subject isolation and giving a smooth out of focus backgrounds which can add a cinematic quality to the shots and even some mystery as to the context of where we find the subjects in the images but somewhere along the way I got bored and felt a little limited by just shooting single subjects and isolating them and I wanted to start to include more context in the images that I was taking and it was about this time that I picked up my first full-frame camera which was the Canon 5D Mark II which by the way is a camera that still holds a really special place in my heart for how much it helped me to develop not just my photography but also my filmmaking putting that 50 mil 1.4 lens on a proper full frame now gave me a true 50 mil focal length and as I went around and started to experiment with this something really clicked with me I thought this is quite true to the way that I see the world I'm moving in the right direction and I've always felt that 50 mil is a very kind of classic focal length there's no Distortion to the image and there's a great balance between still being able to pick out subjects and isolate them in the frame but also to include some context to Aid in my storytelling 50ml is a legitimate and some might suggest a very traditional focal length for street photography famously on ricarti abreso most often used a 50ml as his lens of choice and since then Street photographers the world over have chosen this very versatile focal length as their way of capturing the world because it holds a unique Middle Ground between context inclusion and subject isolation I've been using that full frame 50mm combo for a while and really enjoying it but at some point I got fed up with having to carry a bat backpack with dslrs and lenses with me when I went out to the street I wanted something smaller and more Compact and I did what a load of other photographers did at the time and I went down to the local camera store and I bought the first Fuji X100 it had terrible autofocus and in my case because I bought a second hand one it had a bunch of dead pixels on the sensor as well so it had lots of quirks but I absolutely loved that camera so now with the X100 I have a 23mm lens on an aps-c sensor which gives me roughly a 35 mil focal length and 35 mil was wider than I was comfortable with at the start it took a lot of getting used to and my photography had a big shift moving from 50 mil to 35 mil because I noticed that I was starting to look for scenes more than I was looking for subjects with that field of view and it was about this time I also started to notice light and Shadow in space and to experiment with that as a subject matter the focal length itself was teaching me to recognize different things I was no longer looking for the details as much I was now taking in the whole space and the scene in front of me my view had widened out and lots of you will know when you shoot on one focal length for a while you walk around and start to see in that focal length even when you don't have your camera with you my world really felt like it was opening up at that point and even though I can identify that moving to 35 mil from 50 mil was the biggest perspective shift I had on that focal length journey I very quickly became used to it and it started to feel like a really comfortable way to see and capture the world again 35mm is a very popular choice among Street photographers famously John mayerowitz loved the 35mm focal length because he said It felt it was the closest angle of view to our human eye which is why it felt most natural to him on the streets and I would agree there are a whole slew of Street photographers working today who use 35 mil as their focal length of choice because it allows them the versatility of capturing wider scenes or just taking a few steps closer to capture subjects with context or with one prime lens and then became the fateful day when I walked into a camera store and picked up a secondhand Rico gr2 which I upgraded to the gr3 soon afterwards and that was an 18 mil lens projected onto an aps-c sensor which gave me a 28 mil focal length and you might have noticed up to this point that my focal length Journey's been getting wider and wider from 85 mil to 50 mil to 35 mil and finding my comfort level with each of those to some extent but moving to 28 mil I found the limit of my comfort zone and I realized that this was a focal length I was going to struggle with to this day 28 mil is wider than I like to shoot as the focal length it isn't for me but 28 mil is again a very legitimate choice for street photography Gary winogrand's work is a great example of a very creative and loose use of the 28 mil and there are a load of contemporary photographers out there today using 28 mil either to shoot scenes where you can include a lot more in the frame and tell a more detailed story where many things are happening in a moment or get close to subjects embrace the Distortion and even create some discomfort for the viewer focal length choice is a very subjective thing there's no right answer you have to find the focal length that fits you and the way that you see subjects in the World At Large and it's a really important decision to make not just for the way that it's going to compress the scene in front of you in the lens but also because people forget what an important element the frame around your image is in composing the shot so you have to find that focal length that helps you to compose in the way that's natural to you when I try 28 mil for example I quickly realize it's not for me it's not the way that I see it takes too much into the frame and it was using that focal length that made me realize that actually focal length is often a gut feeling we have to ask ourselves if over time we're actually connecting with it and it's helping us to tell the stories that we want or if it's holding us back and it's important to pay attention to these things are you using a focal length at the moment but you find that you're constantly having to back back up because you're too close to subjects to be able to frame them in the way that you want well then maybe your focal length is too narrow and conversely do you find yourself having to step closer all the time because you're too far away from the subjects you want to capture or are you always cropping in on your image maybe the focal length you're using is too wide and it's not the way that you see the world with the lens that you're currently using the things feel like they're flowing well or do you constantly feel like you're battling is it helping you to come home with more keepers at the end of the day do things feel like they're clicking or is it maybe time for a change and to try something new in my case the pendulum had to swing from 85 on the 1M which I found was too narrower focal length through the 28 mil on the other end which I realized was too wide for me to realize that I am a 35 mil to 50 mil guy depending on the subject that I'm shooting or the lighting on any given day so for me on a normal day out on the streets when the light is good and the sun is out my focal length I've worked out is 35 mil that's how I see the world and I was really grateful last year when Rico brought out this GR r3x which is a 40 mil which is right in my wheelhouse it's not too far away from 35 but a nice pocket camera form factor so now my most used focal length by far is that 40 mil but if I didn't have that camera it would be an X100 or something similar that gives me that 35 mil field of view out and about but on days when the light is flat and I can't use the high contrast light and Shadow to separate elements in my frame or isolate my subjects I go to 50 mil that's my focal length of choice because it helps me to compress the image a little bit and to isolate subjects using a shallower depth of field instead I might make another video digging in on this a little bit more another day but 50 mil has also become my portrait focal length and interestingly my portrait focal length Journey took a very similar trajectory it went from narrow to wide I started 135 and then went to 100 and then to 85 and now I've landed at 50ml and I've realized that's the way that I see portraits that's how much context I want to include in the back background that focal length is right for me I think I can honestly say that if I wanted to strip my kit down to as little as possible I could now quite happily live the rest of my life with one full-frame camera body two if you want some redundancy and a 35mm lens and a 50mm lens that's it and that's a really freeing realization to have made because it means that I've worked out my way of seeing the world and found the lenses and focal lengths that work for the sort of images that I want to make at least for now but I have to say that I learned a lot through all those pendulum swings and none of it was wasted time because as I tried different focal lengths each of them taught me something different and that's the best piece of advice I can give you if you haven't found your focal length yet try something new not for a day because if you try a new lens for a day it's probably going to be frustrating right off the bat because you're not used to it but try it for a while and like I said it's not wasted time because even if that new focal length doesn't become your new focal length of choice I promise you it will teach you a lot narrower focal lengths taught me how to focus on the details and isolate subjects it taught me to recognize different things when I was walking around those little things that everyone was walking past and not noticing it taught me to tell stories in the details like a face picked out of a crowd or hands folded behind somebody's back or a discarded item on the floor that tells the story all its own or a balloon in a tree telling the stories of the Beauty and the little things but wider focal lengths have absolutely taught me about composition when I was shooting on the gr2 a gr3 a 28 mil it meant that everything was usually in focus and there was a lot included in the frame and it was my job as the photographer to Wrangle all those elements in the shots and place them where I wanted them so that the image felt balanced and it told the story that I wanted to tell so those wider focal lengths have been invaluable to help me with my composition in fact if I'm really honest with you I think the reason that my focal length Journey started narrow is because the eye wasn't very confident with my composition skills I had a feeling that if I went to those wider focal lengths straight away that I wouldn't know how to place the elements in the frame and I would make a mess but slowly as things began to widen out over time and as I got to that 28 those composition skills strengthened at each stage along the way and really strengthened it 28 and even though I didn't stay there and I moved back to the middle to 35 and 50. I bring those compositional skills I've developed along the way with me so what's your focal length choice and why on this video I really want to encourage you to go down into the comments section and post the focal length that really works for you and give us your reason why that's the right choice for the sort of images that you make and then if you're a photographer that's really struggling to land on the right focal length for yourself hopefully by reading through everybody else's choices and listening to their subjective reasons why those focal lengths work for them it will give you some ideas about a different focal length to try and experiment with going forward so you can discover your way of seeing and capturing the world lastly thanks again to mpb for sponsoring this episode they're a great online platform for buying and selling used camera gear mpb will appeal to two groups of photographers and the first are those like me who prefer to buy used camera gear to save a bit of money but when you buy through a reputable seller like mpb not only do you get a fair price based on the condition of the gear that you're buying you also get a six month warranty for peace of mind and the second group of those photographers who found that they're just collecting too much gear that they're not using that their gear shelves and their camera bags are just cluttered and filled up with stuff that doesn't get much use mpb will buy that gear off you and I like the idea that then that unused gear that sits in my camera bag goes onto their platform and then stands a chance of being bought by another photographer or filmmaker who will get good use out of it getting a quote for your gear is easy and if you accept the offer they give you they will even send a curry around to pick the item up from you all you need to do is box it up put a label on it and they will even give you a one hour slot when The Courier will arrive which will save you a trip to the post office it couldn't be simpler so whether you look looking to buy a quality used camera body or lens or you want to sell some gear on or you want to do both in one transaction mpb are a great option I will leave a link to their platform down in the description below go along and check them out [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music]

Channel: Sean Tucker

Views: 132,698

Keywords: street photography, photography, 50mm street photography, 85mm street photography, 35mm street photography, 28mm street photography, saul leiter, ernst haas, henri cartier bresson, helen levitt, joel meyerowitz, alex webb, garry winogrand, daido moriyama, canon 350d, canon 5dmk2, canon 50mm f1.4, fuji x100, ricoh gr3, ricoh gr3x, 50mm, 85mm, 35mm, 28mm

Id: F1Vi0fqHunw

Length: 15min 35sec (935 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 20 2022