Street Primes
For street photography, a wideangle prime lens is the best tool for the job. Matthew Richards searches out the best buys
Street photography can mean different things to different people. We never like to shoehorn photographic styles and genres into small boxes with constraining labels, but certain rules can apply, even if they’re meant to be broken. For example, street photography doesn’t have to be set in a street, but it’s typically based within urban surroundings. It also tends to feature people shot candidly as they go about their lives, not posed.
It might sound like street photography is a bit like taking snapshots as you wander around town but it’s a highly demanding style of shooting that requires skill and practice. The most poignant images are those that capture people at an optimum moment, set against their surroundings. As such, you need a keen eye for composition, immaculate timing, and an almost clairvoyant ability to see things unfolding before they happen.
So what makes an ideal street lens? For the sake of speed and candidness, it helps if the lens has a fixed focal length, taking zooming out of the equation. A moderately wide-angle lens with a focal length of around 35mm for full-frame cameras
(24mm for APS-C format cameras) enables a natural field of view, and a fairly good depth of field. With practice, you can employ manual or ‘zone focusing’, enabling you to react instantly as a moment unfolds, without needing to focus before shooting – you could even shoot from the hip, rather than raising the camera to your eye.
Zone focusing is quite an antiquated form of manual focusing, essentially enabling you to sharply render a particular zone within a scene. It’s easiest to apply when using manual-focus lenses, like the Samyang and Zeiss 35mm lenses in this test group. That’s because, as well as having a focus distance scale, they also feature depth of field markings for a large number of aperture settings. These enable you to adjust the lens’s focus ring to set the closest and furthest distances in a scene that’ll appear ‘in focus’, when using varying apertures.
To maximize the depth of field, you can preset a lens’s focus setting to the ‘hyperfocal distance’. The actual distance varies with the focal length of the lens, the aperture in use and the format of the image sensor. The hyperfocal distance becomes shorter with smaller focal lengths and narrower apertures but the depth of field stretches from half the hyperfocal distance to infinity. There are various charts available, websites and apps which you can use to calculate the hyperfocal distance.
For example, when using a 35mm lens at f/8 on a full-frame camera, the hyperfocal distance is about 5m, which would keep everything sharp from 2.5m away, all the way to infinity. Naturally, if your lens doesn’t feature a focus distance scale, you’d need to guess the relevant distance to a suitable object on which you can autofocus or set the focus manually.
Lenses with wider aperture ratings enable faster shutter speeds under dull lighting, without the need to bump up your camera’s ISO setting. The advantage is that you’ll be able to freeze motion and avoid camera-shake, without degrading quality with increased image noise.
However, with wider apertures, the depth of field becomes much shallower, so precise focusing becomes critical. You might often need to autofocus directly on the main subject within the scene, which is counter-productive for candid shooting. Wider-aperture lenses also tend to be bigger and heavier, so they’re more cumbersome and most definitely less discreet. This, again, makes it more difficult to shoot in a candid manner.
The advantage is that you’ll be able to freeze motion and avoid camera-shake, without degrading quality with increased image noise