Which is the best STREET PHOTOGRAPHY lens for you?

hi everyone welcome back to the channel and in this video we're going to be looking at finding the best lens for you and your street photography [Music] okay so let's cut straight to the chase there is no such thing as a best lens for street photography there is only the best lens for you as a street photographer and that's a really important distinction to make manufacturers do not go out and manufacture lenses specifically for one genre of Photography they manufacture a broad range of lenses which they know will cover most situations that photographers find themselves in the good news is the street photographers we don't need any more than one lens and the reason for that is very simple we're not on the street shooting commercially we don't have to please a client you're only shooting for yourself in effect so you don't need more than one lens and the major advantage as a street photographer of having just one lens is that you get rid of any indecisiveness when shooting if you're the type of photographer that takes two or three lenses out on the street I can guarantee you because I know because this was me I can guarantee you you'll spend more time look looking at the back of the camera and cursing the fact that you had the wrong lens on at the wrong time for the right picture then you will concentrating on taking photographs it's a horrendously frustrating experience so by just concentrating on one lens the indecisiveness goes away and you can become familiar with that focal length how that lens allows you to interpret the world everything becomes second nature you can start taking photographs knowing really what the photograph is going to look like before you bring the camera up to your eye and that's a really really powerful position to be in as a photographer [Music] most of the time photographers will decide on a lens based on camera reviews YouTube videos or what their favorite photographer happens to be shooting with the problem with that of course is that in each case the people reviewing the camera the photographer that you admire the YouTuber you're listening to are completely different people see you and when it comes to photography particularly street photography your pictures are largely determined by you as a person and not by the gear that you're using so we're all different our backgrounds are different but the way we were brought up our religious views our political views our cultures are different our ages are different our life experiences are different and these are the things that contribute to our photographs even physical differences like height I mean you consider somebody like me I'm five foot eight inches I see the world at a certain height somebody that's six foot four inches will see the world at a completely different angle to the way that I see the world and that makes a difference so how do we determine which is the best lens for us when it comes to our own photography the first thing we have to consider is focal length so how do we start to determine which is the best focal length for us well for me I guess it's personality to begin with if you're the type of photographer that's a little bit introverted a little bit shy if you're a bit standoffish you're not comfortable with engaging with strangers on the street then you aren't really going to go and buy a 21 millimeter lens and feel comfortable using it you're more likely to want to go for something a little bit longer 50 mil 85 mil if that's the right lens for you if that makes you feel comfortable using it then we're on the road to getting the right focal length and there's some great photographers that have used long lenses on the street so lighter dommer color fantastic imagery taken with telephoto lenses there's nothing wrong with choosing a focal length of lens which isn't popular with other Street photographers if it suits you your personality in the way that you want to see the world on the other hand if you're somebody that's very much into engaging with people if you're very much into standing really close to people then a long lens isn't going to help you it's going to be really frustrating so you're more likely to gravitate to something like a 28 millimeter lens If You're Happy and you've been shooting streak for a while you tend to know pretty much where you want to stand to get a photograph if you find yourself in post-production looking at your computer or getting your films back from the lab or whatever you do and you want to crop your images tighter than what they are chances are you're using a lens which is a little bit too wide for you by the same token if you look at your photographs and they're very tight top to bottom if you're looking at them horizontally and they're very tight top to bottom go a little bit wider with the focal length and that might help you just tidy up that composition that framing give your pictures a little bit more room to breathe if you're shooting with a 28 millimeter lens and everything's you know you have to crop it all the time try a 35mm this is the kind of Journey which I'm talking about there's a little bit of trial and error but fortunately you're not going to be a million miles away from where you are at the moment okay you're going to be within a focal length of where you are at the moment but I know what you're all going to say you're going to say oh well I've got this lens and to buy another lens is going to cost me XYZ amount of money which I don't have and what I would say to you is this in the long run getting the right focal length of lens will be the most valuable thing that you can have as a photographer big Borough or steer well no don't steal obviously but it it's a lot easier now to try the the different focal lengths out a lot of the stores now allow you to go out on Photo walks and try different lenses out and when you decide that that's the focal length that you actually want to buy Pi exchange your other lens in for it or sell your other lens and buy the buy the new one and that will also allow you to get control of your indecisiveness because if you hold on to both lenses the chances are you'll take both lenses out with your on the street and then you'll go backwards and forwards deciding on which lens you actually want to use okay so bring one in get rid of the other one that would be my advice so when it comes to choosing a lens what's most important is that you can take the photographs you want to take with it I'll give you an example this is my Leica F1 not Deluxe lens it's a 50 millimeter lens it's the first 50 millimeter lens I bought for the Leica system it's very expensive it's optically quite an amazing lens it gives a look that no other lens gives It Wide Open it's heavy it's big it's ugly it's it makes the camera unbalanced I didn't buy this as a street photographer I bought this as a wedding photographer shooting in low light 23 24 years ago this is a 50 millimeter summicron lens it's about a quarter of the price it's an F2 lens it's not an F1 lens so it's two stops slower but that two stops in slowness is giving me a lens which is easier to handle it's lighter it's smaller and the f-stops which I'm using on the street you can't sell these two apart so everything from F4 to f8 these two lenses are identical except this one is far better for me as a street photographer than this one is and that's what I'm trying to say you could drop seven thousand pounds on a lot Deluxe lens or 5000 on a used one and not get as good a results as something which is a quarter of the price and that's really important if you look at something like in the Leica realm which is the ram that I know if you look in the Leica realm and you look at say something like a a Zeiss or a voigtlander lens then for most situations on the street you're going to be hard pushed to tell the difference between a Zeiss or voigtlander and a Leica simply because on the street we're dealing with movements we're dealing with spontaneous pictures we're dealing with awkward lighting situations we're not dealing with cameras set on a tripod looking at a scene that doesn't move go for something which you can afford but more than than that go for something which suits the way that you want to take pictures so if that's a lightweight lens or a lens that's maybe two or three stops slower than the professional version of a lens or something doesn't matter go with it and I'll give you a little anecdote here a few years ago I was lucky enough to meet Sebastian Salgado he was over in the UK doing a show and I was able to get backstage and meet him and chat with him and so on and he brought his camera out he took one camera with him wherever he went and on the end of the lens was a 40 millimeter pancake lens when I was shooting Cannon back in the day I I bought this lens for about 75 pounds used okay 75 pounds about I don't know about 90 something like that and this was one of the world's greatest photographers using a pancake lens it fitted the way you saw the world he enjoyed using it it's what he likes so there you go if it's good enough for one of the greatest photographers on the earth to use a cheap lens then it's okay for us you know and he doesn't care he doesn't care what I think of his ends or what anybody else thinks of his lens he's not bothered he just wants to go and take photographs so once we've determined the focal length and we've gone for a a lens which we're really happy with what's the next step well in my experience the next step is to take that lens and shoot and shoot and shoot and shoot with it don't get put off if you go out and you buy this new lens and you put it on your camera and you go out and the first time you go out and your pictures are all over the place or they're not what you wanted to see don't be put off that's the worst thing in the world that you can do is to admit defeat at that that point you have to learn to use a lens you have to take it everywhere you have to go and take pictures with it all the time you have to learn how to go and use that lens how to get closer to the people or further away if you've just bought a telephoto if it's different to what you've had up to this point you have to spend some time with it because that's the thing that really pays dividends learning that lens inside out and back to front is the most important thing that you can actually do lens you've probably noticed in this video that I've used a lot of focal lengths over the years whereas Sarah's just used one just 28. a couple of years ago I wanted to find that one focal length that would allow me to do everything that I wanted to do on the street and I thought I'd found that with the 21 millimeter but after a couple of years of pretty much just using that one lens I started getting a bit bored with it it's a very one-dimensional lens you can only use it within certain distances and you always have to shoot the thing very low down at the chest level or waist level in order to control the Distortion when you're so close to people I'd stayed away from the 28 mainly because it was Sarah's lens it was always her focal length and I didn't want to kind of tread on her toes as it were but she told me not to be stupid and all the rest of it and so we ended up getting another 28 mil lens and I've been using that relentlessly from about June last year till now now there was a couple of blips where I wasn't getting what I wanted and put the 21 back on again all the 35 back on and and then I decided that it was nothing to do with the lens it was to do with what I was looking at or what I was trying to take and so I've gone on this journey and now six seven months later I'm perfectly comfortable with that lens and the beauty about it is that even though myself and Sarah now shoot pretty much with the same lens our pictures still remain quite different from each other and that just goes to show that it's not the lens that makes the photograph it's the photographer that makes the photograph the lens is just the way the photographer can translate what they're seeing in front of them into a photograph which everybody else can see thanks for watching I hope you enjoyed the video and if you did please give it a thumbs up and consider subscribing to the channel subscribing helps us more than you can ever imagine when it comes to having a YouTube channel like this and if you have any questions or comments please leave them below I'd love to know what you guys are shooting with I'd love to know what focal length um people watching this video actually use in their street photography be really interesting to actually see that from you anyway like I said hope you enjoyed this video and I'll see you on the next one [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Laughter] [Music]

Channel: Walk Like Alice

Views: 24,889

Keywords: street photography, lenses, leica, camera, how to

Id: 5PKmuDVVMVs

Length: 12min 26sec (746 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 19 2023