Why a Standard Lens is Perfect for Street and Travel Photography

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Standard lenses (also called normal lenses) have a kind of mystique amongst photographers. Perhaps it’s because Henri Cartier-Bresson was famous for using one, maybe it has something to do with nostalgia for the times when most cameras came with a 50mm kit lens rather than the zooms that are common today. Regardless, if you are looking for a versatile prime lens for street or travel photography then a standard lens is an excellent choice. My 35mm prime (a standard lens on an APS-C camera) has become my favorite lens for street and travel photography.

f/1.4

Let’s start with some definitions.

A standard lens for a full-frame or 35mm film camera is a 50mm prime (one exception – Pentax makes a 43mm f/1.9 lens).

For an APS-C system a 35mm prime lens (such as the excellent 35mm f/1.4 lens made by Fujifilm) is a standard lens. Some photographers also consider a 28mm lens to be a standard.

For a Micro four-thirds camera you need a 25mm prime.

Last year I took a wide-angle lens, a standard lens and a short telephoto lens with me on a five week trip to China. I used them all for street photography, but when I analyzed the photos afterwards I realized that over 90% of them were taken with the standard lens (a 35mm f/1.4 prime). That trend continued during a later trip to Spain.

Here are some of the reasons that I used the standard lens so much more than the others, combined with some tips for making the most from them yourself.

1. Standard lenses have wide maximum apertures

Standard lenses typically have a maximum aperture somewhere between f/1.2 and f/2. This helps you take photos in low light, or use the wide aperture settings for selective focus, or both. This is really useful if you take photos in a street market or some other lively location at night, or inside a dimly lit building.

The photo above, taken in a historical building in Hangzhou, is a good example. The light was so low that I had to set the aperture to f/1.4 and ISO to 6400 to take the photo.

2. Standard lenses let you take photos in the street without getting too close to people

Standard lenses let you take candid photos of people in the street without getting too close. In China, I found that most people ignored me as I took photos with my 35mm lens. It may have helped that the Fuijfilm camera I used (an X-T1) is much smaller than a digital SLR and less intimidating. It may also have helped that the Chinese are such keen photographers that another person with a camera doesn’t draw much attention.

From a practical point of view, the standard lens lets you take photos of people without getting so close to them that you invade their personal space.

I spotted this man by the entrance of a restaurant in Hangzhou. His clothing and thoughtful pose caught my eye – I believe he was there to encourage people to come into the restaurant. It was only afterwards that I realized there was an interesting juxtaposition between him and the statue to his left.

You can take environmental portraits like this very easily with a standard lens.

Street Photography

3. You can use a standard lens to simplify the background

Street scenes are naturally chaotic, and it’s the photographer’s job to make some kind of visual order from this. The narrower field of view of standard lenses (compared to wide-angle lenses) means that you naturally include less background in your images. You can also throw the background at least slightly out of focus by selecting an aperture of f2.8 or wider. This is much harder to do with wide-angle lenses.

An image like this, taken in a street market in Xi’an, has a much tighter background than you would be able to get with a wide-angle lens. That helped me exclude other people from the scene and focus attention on the woman.

Simplify the Background

4. You can use a standard lens to capture details

Standard lenses are good for capturing details. Street photography is not just about making portraits. You can build up a feeling for a place by photographing details that capture its character and spirit.

Most standard lenses can focus quite closely to the subject, making them a very versatile lens for travel photography.

This photo of fish taken in a market in Cadiz, Spain is a good example.

Details

5. Use a standard lens to make a portrait of somebody with permission.

Standard lenses are ideal for portraits. They work well if you stop people in the street and ask if you can take their photo. While you could argue that a longer focal length will help you take portraits with a more flattering perspective, the advantage of a standard lens is that it is smaller and less intimidating to the person that you have approached. You are much more likely to get a natural response.

Earlier this year I went to Carnival in Cadiz. There were lots of people in costume, but only a few with face paint. When I saw somebody with interesting face paint I asked if I could take a photo. Every time I asked, the person said yes, and I took a couple of photos.

Here is one of them.

Portraits with Permission

6. You can capture scenes including people for scale or context

Standard lenses are good for capturing scenes which include people to give scale or context. The angle of view is wide enough that the people in your photo, if you are far away, are not bothered about being in it. They will probably think you are taking a photo of the scene behind them, especially if it is picturesque and worthy of a snapshot. If the person is positioned on a third, or at the edge of the frame, then the camera won’t be pointing directly at them. Even if they notice you they don’t feel threatened by it.

People for Scale or Context

This photo, taken in Beijing, shows a local woman amongst some of the beautiful architecture by Beihei Lake.

About the Author:
Andrew S Gibson is a professional photographer based in New Zealand. He has taken photographs in 60 countries now as a Technical Editor for EOS magazine. He produced a Mastering Lenses guide for photographers.

Balance and Visual Weight in Landscape Photography

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Landscape photography is all about capturing the essence of a place and evoking emotion in the viewer. One of the most effective ways to achieve this is by understanding and using the principles of balance and visual weight. These concepts help the photographer create harmonious compositions that captivate the viewer’s attention.

1. Understanding Balance

Balance in a photograph refers to the distribution of visual elements, ensuring that no one part of the image overwhelms another. This creates a sense of equilibrium, where the viewer feels at ease when looking at the photograph.

There are two main types of balance:

  • Symmetrical Balance: This occurs when both halves of an image mirror each other. Think of reflection shots, where a mountain is reflected perfectly in a still lake.
  • Asymmetrical Balance: This is achieved when different elements on either side of an image have equal visual weight but are not identical. For instance, a large tree on one side might be balanced by a cluster of smaller trees on the other.

2. Grasping the Concept of Visual Weight

Visual weight refers to the ability of an element within an image to draw the viewer’s attention. Factors that contribute to an element’s visual weight include:

  • Size: Larger objects typically have more visual weight than smaller ones.
  • Contrast: An element that contrasts with its surroundings, either in color, tone, or texture, will stand out.
  • Placement: Elements placed towards the center tend to feel heavier than those at the edges.
  • Complexity: Detailed or complex subjects can draw more attention than simpler ones.

3. Tips for Achieving Balance with Visual Weight

  • Rule of Thirds: Place main subjects on the intersections of the dividing lines. This naturally achieves balance in many scenes.
  • Use Leading Lines: Paths, rivers, or shadows can guide the viewer’s eyes through the frame, balancing out elements of visual weight.
  • Incorporate Negative Space: The empty space can balance a prominent subject, preventing it from overwhelming the image.
  • Pay Attention to Natural Symmetry: Reflections, shadows, and formations can provide natural ways to balance a photo.

4. The Intentional Imbalance

There are moments when an intentional imbalance can be powerful. By making one element overwhelmingly dominant, photographers can evoke feelings of loneliness, awe, or vulnerability. However, it’s essential to use this technique judiciously to avoid confusing the viewer.

Conclusion

Understanding balance and visual weight is crucial for creating compelling landscape photographs. By mastering these concepts, you’ll be better equipped to guide your viewer’s eye through your image, telling a more engaging story about the scene you’ve captured. Like all rules in art, once you understand them thoroughly, don’t be afraid to break them creatively to achieve the mood or message you’re aiming for in your work.

Using Manual Focus for Landscape Photography

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In the fast-paced digital age, where cameras are equipped with advanced autofocus systems, the ancient art of manual focus might seem obsolete. However, for some landscape photographers, this traditional technique remains not only relevant but preferred. Let’s delve into the reasons why manual focus can be a valuable tool for landscape photography.

1. Precision Control:

While modern autofocus systems are impressive, they’re not always perfect. In landscape photography, the desired point of focus might be subtle — perhaps a delicate dewdrop on a leaf or a specific rock in a river. Manual focus allows photographers to select and refine their focus point with surgical precision, ensuring that the intended subject is razor-sharp.

2. Creative Freedom:

Landscape photography isn’t always about getting everything in focus. Sometimes, a little selective blur is what you need to draw attention to a specific subject or create a sense of depth. By using manual focus, photographers can make artistic decisions on what elements should be in focus and which should not, adding depth and interest to their compositions.

3. Unpredictable Subjects:

Although not unique to landscapes, scenes with elements like mist, rain, or moving foliage can confuse autofocus systems. By manually focusing, photographers can bypass these distractions and focus on what truly matters.

4. Low Light Mastery:

In the soft light of dawn or the deep shadows of dusk, even the best autofocus systems might hunt or fail to lock focus. During these magical moments of light, manual focus allows photographers to ensure they get the shot without struggling against the limitations of their gear.

5. Hyperlocal Distance:

One common practice in landscape photography is using the hyperfocal distance to ensure maximum sharpness from the foreground to the background. Calculating and setting the hyperfocal distance is more straightforward with manual focus, giving seasoned photographers an edge in capturing sprawling vistas.

6. Avoiding Autofocus “Hunting”:

In scenes with less contrast or in challenging light conditions, autofocus can “hunt” – constantly adjusting without settling on a focus point. This not only wastes battery but also might cause you to miss a fleeting moment. Manual focus eliminates this problem.

7. Connection to the Craft:

There’s a unique satisfaction derived from manually focusing a lens. It connects the photographer to the act of capturing the image on a deeper level. This deliberate, tactile process can slow photographers down, encouraging them to be more thoughtful about composition, framing, and the story they’re trying to tell.

8. Equipment Longevity:

Autofocus motors, especially in older lenses, might wear out or become less accurate over time. By mastering manual focus, a photographer can extend the life of their equipment, ensuring they can still capture stunning images even if the autofocus fails.

In Conclusion:

While there’s no denying the advancements and conveniences of modern autofocus systems, manual focus offers a combination of precision, control, and artistic freedom that can be invaluable in landscape photography. For those willing to practice and perfect the technique, manual focus is more than just a nod to tradition; it’s a tool that can elevate your photographic vision to new heights.

Why Aperture Priority Is the Best Mode for Wedding Photography

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“Real pros shoot manual.”

If I had a penny for every time I had heard this in a photography forum, I could have given up wedding photography years ago and bought my own island. The sad fact is that photography forums are not really a great place to learn about photography. More often than not, one or two “strong characters” will voice an opinion, and then their acolytes will repeat it until all opposition is crushed. Forums are more about clashes of egos than real photography advice, with one or two notable exceptions.

Often, the best real-world choice is worked out by photographers in the field, not armchair enthusiasts with an axe to grind. I have shot in manual mode for prolonged stretches, and I do still use it if that’s the best option, but for wedding photography or anything where things can unfold quickly, I find aperture priority the best choice.

My Journey Away from Manual Mode

Like most young photographers who started shooting film, I was taught to shoot in manual mode and use a separate light meter. I used black-and-white film and slide film. Slide film has a very low tolerance for exposure error, so measuring light with an incident meter was a must. If you don’t know, an incident light meter measures the light falling on a subject and disregards its tone, so the reading is always accurate. In an ideal world, this is the best choice; the trouble is, this isn’t an ideal world!

I have always loved street photography, and it’s something I’ve done for pleasure for many years, but more often than not, the lighting conditions are not ideal. In many ways, this was my training for becoming a wedding photographer. For years, I shot in manual—mainly because I used a rangefinder (a Voightlander Bessa R), and it only had a manual mode. This was fine when the light was consistent, but a total pain if it wasn’t. I would meter and set my camera up for sunlight only to miss shots in the shade or vice versa. On days with broken sunshine, the light would be a constant frustration, and I would have to constantly refer back to my meter. In the end, I spent more time checking my light meter than I did shooting pictures, and I knew something had to change.

When I switched to digital for my 35mm work, I started to play around with my technique to suit the new equipment I was using. I found that the in-camera metering was good enough. Most of the time, I could let it do its own thing, and the exposures would be dead on. I had enough experience to know when they wouldn’t be, and in those situations I would override the camera. I found that using aperture priority mode meant I spent more time looking for pictures and less time worrying about camera settings.

The Speed of Auto, The Control of Manual

When I started shooting weddings, I found that my aperture setting was one of the main weapons in helping me turn the chaos of a wedding into beautiful images. Aperture choice is one of the main determining factors towards the look of a photograph. You can use it to blur out the busy backgrounds that can ruin wedding shots. Weddings move fast—too fast for fiddling around with your camera if the light changes, so a degree of automation is a real necessity.

Reasons I Prefer Aperture Priority

Here are the reasons I prefer Aperture Priority over Manual mode in a wedding environment:

1. Most of the time it’s just not possible to use a separate meter.

If you’re positioned at the back of the church during the ceremony and the light changes, you can hardly walk up the aisle, take a quick incident reading off the bride’s face, and retire back to your station. If you are using the camera’s built-in meter, there is very little point in setting the camera manually when the camera would set itself to the same way automatically. If I feel that the camera has got it wrong, I use exposure compensation. That way, if the light levels drop, the exposure will still be correct.

2. Aperture priority gives me control over the look of an image.

Depth of field can have a decisive effect on the look of an image. An aperture of f/2.8 will look very different to f/11. Once the shutter is fast enough to freeze motion, you can’t tell the difference between 1/500 and 1/2000 of a second, so Shutter Priority mode does not offer the same aesthetic control, especially as your aperture will change in variable light and change the look of the images.

3. Modern camera meters are good enough (most of the time).

Modern camera meters will get exposure right 95 percent of the time, so not using it can almost feel like an affectation. Weddings are hard work, and it makes sense to let technology help you where appropriate.

4. I can concentrate on image making, not technicalities.

The less I have to worry about technical concerns, the more I concentrate on creativity. Ultimately, creativity is what people are hiring me for, so I make sure I’m not getting too bogged down in the technical side of things. I’ve come up with a simple way of working that I can rely on, and I stick to that.

5. Events move quickly, and I need to capture them.

I’m not a fan of making the bride and groom repeat anything. I think you can tell when something is fake, so I treat every event at a wedding as a one-shot deal. That means I have to think fast, be flexible, and react to things as they happen. I don’t have time to keep fiddling with my camera, so aperture priority gives me the perfect balance of control and automation.

6. It’s better in low light.

I can often find myself at the ragged edge of low-light capability at weddings. If things are getting tricky, I use aperture priority to decide what needs to be in focus in the frame and then adjust ISO to get a usable shutter speed. This way I’m always at the best ISO I can get away with.

Conclusion (And Some Caveats)

I’ve stopped using manual mode for fast-paced situations, but one of the reasons I can use aperture priority successfully is that I have enough experience to know when the camera is likely to be caught out. If you’re a beginner or intermediate photographer who wants to take his or her photography more seriously, I still recommend a prolonged length of time learning to use manual mode on your camera.

Too often today, workshops and online tutorials try to persuade you that photography is easy, and you don’t have to know the technical stuff. Well, unfortunately, there is no such thing as a free lunch, and understanding photography at its most basic is still a necessary grounding in the craft of image making. Aperture priority is a great tool, but it’s not a replacement for a good photographic brain. The real skill in photography is learning what to do in a myriad of circumstances, and choosing the best compromise to suit the situation.

Happy Shooting!

About the Author:
Toby Key is a wedding and portrait photographer based in West Sussex, UK.

How to Create Stunning Portraits of Your Dog

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Photographing your dog can be a terrific way to not only get amazing photos of a beloved family member, it’s also good practice and will sharpen your over all photography skills.

Like any other portrait session, the first step is to mentally pre-visualize what you want the end result to be. Please don’t skip this step. Hit or miss, shooting tons of pictures, hoping one will “turn out good” just doesn’t cut it. It is SO much easier to get a good portrait if you have a clearly defined idea of what you want.

What type of dog is it? Is it a large “working dog” type? Or a frilly lap dog? These questions will help determine the best backdrop. An Irish Setter posed at sunset in a field of wild grasses would be stunning. Stick your Chihuahua in there and you may never find it again! Conversely, a Chihuahua sitting on the brim of a large Mexican hat would be adorable. The Irish Setter sitting there would be ludicrous. (And crush the hat!)

Will your dog stay on command? It can be frustrating to get your dog positioned just right, and then every time you back up to take the shot, the dog (lovingly) follows you. If you’re alone, you may have to take the dog back and reposition him several times before the idea sinks in. Don’t get mad, they don’t really understand what’s going on. Yelling at your dog won’t help; it will just make them feel bad and the hurt expression will ruin any shots you finally DO get.

By the way, don’t give the dog treats as a way to make them stay in place. They will be looking down at and chewing on the food, and you won’t be able to get a good shot. Then, as soon as the treat is gone, they’ll come over to you, hoping for more.

If you can, get someone to help pose the dog. That way, you’re in position and ready to snap the shutter the instant you see a good shot. Use a long lens so the field of view is very narrow. This will allow your helper to stay near the dog, and they can grab it every time it starts to move. Sooner or later, the dog will get the idea and just sit there posing for you.

Speaking of long lenses, not only do they allow your posing helper to stay near the dog, but they allow you to fill the frame with your subject!

This is Vital!

The number one thing that ruins pet portraits is making your pet too small in the frame. We see this beautiful scene, shoot it and when we look at the final print, our dog is nothing but a tiny blob, somewhere down in the corner. Fill the frame! If you end up totally eliminating the background, that’s better than not being able to see your subject. (Same with people.)

Shoot at the dog’s level. Unless you are VERY short and your dog is VERY tall, I can’t imagine a session where you aren’t down on one knee, or both, or prone on the ground.

Focus on the eyes. Sharp eyes are vital and can save many otherwise not so hot photos. Get back far enough so that the eyes can be sharp without blurring or distorting the nose. Be sure to get a catch light in the eyes. You may as well just toss any shots that don’t have catch lights, they aren’t worth keeping.

The dog has to look alert and attentive. This is accomplished by making sure the ears are UP. Here’s how. Without the dog knowing, have a squeaking dog toy. When the dog is positioned properly, squeak it. The dog will whip its head around to you; its ears will be at attention and it will have a fantastic, attentive expression.

Be Ready and Focused

The instant the dog looks, snap the shot! Auto focus is best so the shutter button is already halfway depressed. You have to be fast! Reading the last sentence takes longer than the photo should take. A lot longer!

Take bunches of shots of each pose. It’s amazing how fast a dog can lap its tongue over its nose.

Poses

You’ll want to get at least one shot of them lying down at a 45 degree angle to the camera (both from the right side and from the left) and one straight on to the camera. Sitting, the same sequence. Then zoom in and get a full frame head shot, then back off a little for a head and shoulders view or if lying down get head and front paws—like the Sphinx. Have your posing helper get the dog’s attention by gently talking to her while you get a few 3/4 and full profiles.

Focus on the eyes. Sharp eyes are vital and can save many otherwise not so hot photos. Get back far enough so that the eyes can be sharp without blurring or distorting the nose. Be sure to get a catch light in the eyes. You may as well just toss any shots that don’t have catch lights, they aren’t worth keeping.

The dog has to look alert and attentive. This is accomplished by making sure the ears are UP. Here’s how. Without the dog knowing, have a squeaking dog toy. When the dog is positioned properly, squeak it. The dog will whip its head around to you; its ears will be at attention and it will have a fantastic, attentive expression.

Be Ready and Focused

The instant the dog looks, snap the shot! Auto focus is best so the shutter button is already halfway depressed. You have to be fast! Reading the last sentence takes longer than the photo should take. A lot longer!

Take bunches of shots of each pose. It’s amazing how fast a dog can lap its tongue over its nose.

Poses

You’ll want to get at least one shot of them lying down at a 45 degree angle to the camera (both from the right side and from the left) and one straight on to the camera. Sitting, the same sequence. Then zoom in and get a full frame head shot, then back off a little for a head and shoulders view or if lying down get head and front paws—like the Sphinx. Have your posing helper get the dog’s attention by gently talking to her while you get a few 3/4 and full profiles.