Lens Considerations for A Digital Camera

A friend asked me recently about lens choices for a digital camera — what to bring along on her trip to Asia. She was concerned about not only weight but having to do too much changing of lenses while shooting.

Airline restrictions have made the task of paring your carry-on gear into rocket science. It used to be that if you had the strength, you could bring the kitchen sink along if you could lift it. No more. While in the US, the TSA will allow photographers a camera bag/pack in ADDITION to a purse/computer bag and a conventional carry-on, many airlines pretend not to have heard this.

Once you venture onto an international flight, it’s still the Wild West — some carriers have liberal carry-on allowances, but others are much more restrictive. Therefore it pays a photographer, whether amateur or professional, to carry the minimum amount of equipment necessary to get the job done.

A common mistake photographers make is to carry too many zoom lenses of overlapping focal lengths: for example, an 18-55, 70-300, and a 28-80. You want as little overlap as possible so you’re not always reaching into the bag for a new lens & thus miss the shot. I use a Canon 24-105 lens as my main ‘walking’ lens, shooting on either my Canon 5D MKII or 7D (the 7D has a sensor size similar to your Rebel). My other wide angle zoom is a 16-35.

Below are two galleries from a couple of recent trips. Almost all the people and landscape shots in these two galleries were shot with the 24-105. In Japan I was using mainly the 5D MKII (full sensor size, no magnification factor), whereas in Buenas Aires I was shooting with the 7D (1.6X ‘magnification/). The wildlife close-ups were shot with Canon’s 100-400mm L lens.

The point is to have a lens that covers 90% of the situations you’re likely to encounter so you don’t have to think about changing lenses or carry two cameras. That being said, my first ‘real’ camera was a Leica M2 with only one lens (50mm) & I learned how to pre-visualize a shot with limited options. It just means you have to be more clever at repositioning yourself prior to the shot!

Although having a digital camera like the Nikon Coolpix can be an advantage size, weight and unobtrusive-wise, these smaller cameras lack the degree of control of the ‘standard SLRs’. One thing that you have to watch out for is shutter lag, where there’s a delay (even of a few tenths of a second) between pressing the shutter and the image taken. This will kill any ‘capture the moment’ type photos. See a previous post: Photography Tips – How to Buy a Digital Camera.

Most smaller camera do not have through the lens viewfinders or even any viewfinder at all, but rather rely on using a large LCD screen to compose & shoot. This kills any change of critical composition or capturing subtle movements or expressions, as you just can’t see the details clearly enough. If you are in bright sunlight, this is especially true.

An SLR allows an undistracted, clear view of the subject. It also, properly operated, allows for much more sophisticated control of where you focus in the scene — critical for ‘street’ photography of people (& wildlife, for that matter).

As you can see, I’m a fan of the SLR as a digital camera for serious work, though I’ve had a lot of fun with my iPhone camera lately (more to come on that in a future post). For photojournalistic-style people photography, I’d suggest lenses like: