This post is about pure photography technique and equipment.
Lenses. You often hear people argue, or discuss the relative merits of using what are supposed to be sharper ‘prime’ lenses, ie: a lens with a fixed focal length. Then you hear what I consider to be the most useless suggestion of all – that if you want to frame more or less of a subject, just ‘zoom with your feet’. That’s great advise unless your fixed 50mm or 35mm causes you to have to ‘zoom’ yourself into the middle of traffic. For travel photography in an urban landscape, there’s nothing like a quality zoom lens. And the typical kit range or around 17mm-55mm (28-82mm) or close to that, is a highly useful range. This covers your standard mid-range focal lengths of 28, 35, 50 and slightly telephoto, all in one lens. And without moving, you can adjust your composition to include exactly what you want, quickly. And in the urban environment, you can never frame your subject fast enough. In a millisecond, just as you’re about to take your shot, in walks the tourist group, the person stopping to text and check their emails, or the ubiquitous car or truck that parks right in your shot. No, the zoom is a very useful tool. And on the better cameras today, some of the standard kit zooms are very sharp indeed. Some are better than others but they’re pretty good these days. The prime lens does offer one significant advantage though, namely they are often available with smaller apertures like f1.4 or f1.8. That allows for faster shutter speeds in low light situations. A good thing. But the zooms all have some type of image stabilization to greatly reduce blurred photos because the zooms are ‘slower’ with minimum apertures that usually start around f3.5 or so. Another nice advantage for the ‘fast prime’ is the narrow depth of field at smaller apertures can often make a photo more interesting with a nicely blurred background separated from a sharply focused subject. But for me, especially photographing in the a urban environment, the zoom provides more actual compositional opportunities.
Take this shot of the fire escape. When photographing in a city, Rome, Istanbul, New York, you name it, many of the great little compositions you’ll find don’t appear right in front of you, from a street level POV (point of view). Some of the coolest stuff you’ll see is up a little bit, or farther away than you can get to without running like a crazy person for a block or two.
When I framed this shot of a New York City fire escape, I zoomed around until I had just the visual and graphic elements I wanted within the frame – exactly what I ‘chose’ to be included and importantly, excluded from the final shot. Zoom lenses just give you more compositional flexibility and freedom. And that’s always a good thing.
As always, please help me by browsing through my ebooks or photo galleries of beautiful New York City black and white photography. There you can select a beautiful high-resolution print file that you can purchase and download for only $20. And, I will donate 20% of the purchase price to one of the global humanitarian charities that you can select on checkout.
Until next time, happy shooting.
Bob