This is a great topic and one that is always in vogue in the various blogs. The question always revolves around which lens is better or which camera. All the responses will deal with corner sharpness, color fidelity and other typically useless topics that have nothing to do with photography. Too many teccheies I'm afraid. On a recent post in DPreview.com asking such a question, my reply was this:
It all depends at what you mean. I feel that photography is just that. Capture a fleeting moment as fast as possible. The lens and camera are there just to facilitate this. Today any decent camera can do this and many P&S cameras are becoming actually good for this task. The lens should capture the emotion. If it's sharp or not at the corners is irrelevant to me: if the colors are not absolutely pefect is also irrelevant to me. I'm looking for an image that says something unique.
Having said this, the 35 f2 is a great lens for this task. It's light and cheap - just in case something goes wrong - and is does a superb job. My favorite lens to travel, for example is the 25-85 3.5-4.5 EF. It's very light and does a good job. I've posted many shots with this lens on my blog. The best thing is to concentrate on the image and not to be bogged down with all the equipment. I feel that the DSLR is not really truly suited for street photography as it's intimidating and very large. We are photographers, not snipers. This is to preface the fact that long lenses are, for me, out of the question for street photography. The reason the old RF's were good at this was the fact that they were unobtrusive and quiet. And yes, the 35mm was the ideal focal lenght. I alsmost used mt 35mm Summicron exclusively on my Leicas with the 50mm Summicron hardly ever used.
Shoot, don't pixel peep is my motto
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Canon 50mm EF. PERFECT LENS for street photography and street portraits. Just close enough to get right in there, but wide enough for some nice street scenes without a lot of distortion. Its really the only lens I use now. And my 100mm. :-) Zooms suck!
ReplyDeleteIt's funny but a fixed focal length lens frees you as you just see the scene as is without all that zooming that makes you almost neurotic and makes you shoot more but makes you less creative in the end as it takes away a lot of your involvement.
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