Lenses To Use While Traveling

 Lenses To Use While Traveling

by William Lulow

Note: Thanks to David Schumer of Scarsdale, NY for inspiring this article.

Well the summer is just about on us and even though the coronavirus has put a damper on travel, you can still walk around your own neighborhood, wearing a mask of course and keeping your distance, in search of things to photograph. I have done some interesting shots of flowers just on my own property and some scenes on our long walks in our neighborhood. You see a whole lot more when you are walking than when you drive through a place. What I have always said about travel photography still holds true. When I’m traveling in a new city or new countryside, my first thoughts are to look for scenes to photograph that are representative of the area. This just about dictates what gear I need to have with me. So, let me explain a bit.

Every bit of photographic equipment you have in your bag has a specific purpose. You buy a lens or a filter in order to give you the ability to capture something in which you are interested. Right? But when you’re just exploring a new city or walking down the street in your own neighborhood, do you really want to carry every piece of gear you own on the off-chance you will see something you wish to photograph? I doubt it. That’s why, when I travel anywhere, I usually carry one camera and a wide-angle lens. The reason for this is that I consider my other lenses “specialty” lenses. My telephotos are for either really distant shots or portraits and my macro lenses are for extreme closeups. It’s true that I might come across a scene that would demand a telephoto lens, but usually not. What I am saying is that if you are just walking around, or on a tour, and you want to document with good quality images, what you have seen, a good wide-angle lens should do the trick. What I’m talking about here is a lens perhaps a bit shorter than a “normal” one for your camera. If you are shooting with a crop-sensor camera, it will make your images just a bit larger than normal. On my camera it is about 1.6 times larger. So that my 50mm lens would actually become an 80mm lens, my 20mm wide-angle a 32mm lens and so forth. My 135mm telephoto really acts like a 216mm lens. Keep in mind that on 35mm film cameras or cameras with full-frame sensors, lens ranges are as follows:

Wide Angle: 20mm – 35mm

Normal: 50mm – 60mm

Medium Telephoto: 85mm – 135mm

Long Telephoto: 150mm – 300mm

Here is a handy chart that details specific lens’ angles of view that should be helpful in determining what you would see with each of your lenses:

This image was made in Porto, Portugal with my Canon and a 20mm lens fitted with a gradient ND filter. I think I was wearing my photographer’s vest (below) and also had my 60mm lens with me. That was it. I had a student not too long ago, who was going on an African safari with her husband and wanted to be sure to get pictures of animals. This is a very special photography trip and calls for specific kinds of equipment. For one thing, she was not going to be walking in the jungle, but instead, sitting in an open Land Rover with no windows. In addition, the vehicle would be traveling over dusty, dirt roads. So I suggested she actually bring two cameras and two basic lenses: one a long telephoto, which she rented, and the other a more “normal” lens for ordinary shots of people and places. Why two cameras? You don’t want to be changing lenses in a dusty environment because the dirt will eventually really clog up a camera and render it basically useless. I also recommended that she buy a bean bag to stabilize the camera instead of a tripod. The bean bag can be transported empty and filled with dirt or gravel which you can get just about anywhere.

So if you had a cropped sensor camera and you wanted a really wide angle view, you would have to have a lens around 10mm to 12mm. Your “normal” lens would need to be around 32mm and a good telephoto somewhere around 135mm to 150mm. So the lens I use most on my crop-sensor camera bodies is my 20mm which gives me a slightly wider-than-normal view. I used to carry a 17-55mm f/2.8 (about 26mm -88mm) lens which was a really good zoom lens as a compromise. (It’s also a full-speed lens. It will carry its speed through all of the zoom range).  The 26mm was a nice wide angle, while the 88mm end of it was a short telephoto. This is a relatively fair-priced lens. You can buy it new for around $700. If you only wanted to carry one lens, this would be the one I would recommend. But, the 20mm f/2.8 is a bit better lens I think because it is a fixed-focus (prime) one. (I have learned that this lens has been discontinued by Canon, but they have a really great 24mm f/1.4 wide angle that’s fairly expensive, but a great lens. It would provide an image in the 38mm range on a cropped-sensor camera. Still a wide-angle).

Think about it for a minute. Let’s say you have a 300mm telephoto lens that you’d like to use and you are walking around New York City or Paris or maybe even London. What will you be able to photograph with that long lens? A sign? Someone sitting by a fountain? Part of a street?  The point is that a lens like that really limits what you can shoot. It’s field-of-view is so narrow as to exclude some important parts of the place you visit. The telephoto lens has a specific purpose. It brings a distant subject closer by enlarging them, cropping them and, depending on camera settings, throwing the background way out of focus. This lens is designed to do these things and to focus on small objects or people at a distance in a town square, say. It’s therefore, not a good lens to give you an “overall” image of the place you are visiting. (Unless of course, your thought is to make “street portraits” of unsuspecting townsfolk).  It is also fairly heavy as lenses go and almost demands that you have a tripod on which to rest it. It is a mind-set kind of thing when you travel. You need to decide ahead of time, what kinds of images you want to make. That should determine your selection of gear to take.

When I am traveling, if I need to get a closer view of something, I will usually walk up closer to it. Again, it’s true that I may not have the time or energy to do this all the time, but I have to determine if it’s worth carrying a lot of gear just for that one shot. Making really good images is a thought process more than anything else. So my gear, if I’m just exploring a new place is simply a camera body with a wide-angle lens attached and some filters. I really don’t want to have a lot of gear on me when I’m walking around. I don’t like to carry a “camera bag” in a foreign city because it just screams “steal me!” So I have a couple of little pouches that I got to carry Army stuff in and modified them to fit on my belt. That way I can carry an extra lens if I wanted to without having something on my back or over my shoulder. Another thing I do is to wear my photographer’s vest.

These are handy things to have for the traveling photographer. They have pockets galore to store just about everything you would need to carry with you while walking around anywhere. News photographers started wearing these things a long time ago when they carried two camera bodies, a couple of lenses, filters and other gear necessary for being on the go all the time. They also have pockets that close with Velcro making pickpockets shy away from you. Also, everything is in your purview. It’s right on your person. Plus, they are vests and are not too hot to wear even in warm climates. Sometimes I wear mine with just a polo shirt.

As another example, I took a walk the other day in my own home town. We are still under restrictions due to the Covid-19, so I decided to bring my camera with the 20mm lens. Here is one shot I did with it:

This image was made at ISO 100, f/9 @ 1/60th of a second.  The reason I am using it is because it represents a typical scenic shot of a town. Notice how the foreground is sharp, including the sign, but the rest of the town is fairly sharp as well. My point of focus was a spot about in the middle of the frame, but with an aperture of f/9, just about everything is sharp. The composition is strong because the white picket fence leads your eye into the shot. The shutter speed was enough to stop any movement of the flag in the foreground. The gradient neutral-density filter I used darkened the sky nicely. These are the kinds of shots I’m searching for if I’m just walking around any location. If I saw something interesting and I had my 60mm macro lens with me, I could always walk right up to a storefront, fence, doorway or whatever and get a closer shot. I really don’t need a telephoto lens if I’m just walking like this.

Now, with all this being said, you could decide that you might want to zero in on various details on your “walkabout.” That would dictate a different lens. But that is one of those specific photo “hunts,” so to speak. They are images you have in mind that you’d like to document. They are more than just recording your visit to a new place.

The moral of this story is that when you are exploring a location or just revisiting places you’ve been to before, keep it simple. One camera, a lens and maybe an extra lens should do the trick. Again, I’m thinking here more about walking around while touring. I also have carried my equipment in the car and then I normally have all of it with me in a backpack. Then I can operate out of the car’s trunk and take whatever I need for the shots I have in mind. But, as I said, seeing things from a moving vehicle is another experience entirely.

So the gear you travel with involves some thought as to the kind of images you intend to make. There is really no reason to carry all your gear when you are just walking around. You also might think of revisiting a place if you think better images could be gotten by using longer lenses. Also, remember that unless you’ve got a really good zoom lens, cheap zoom lenses will usually yield inferior results.

And, of course, don’t forget that we all have cell phone cameras these days. I often make images with my iPhone and then integrate them into my shoots as well.