What’s the best lens for street photography?

For me, street photography is all about traveling light and I really don’t want to be walking the streets with a bag full of lenses. So this is how and why I use the lenses I do and I’ll give you my top tip for lens choice in street photography.

As with most considerations about gear, lens choice is a very personal thing and you have to do what works for you. I’ve been doing this for a long time and what works for me - without any doubt - is a wide-angle prime lens  - and by ‘prime lens’ I mean a lens with a fixed focal length.

But why a prime lens and not a more versatile zoom? Well, there are a number of reasons:

• Firstly, zooming inevitably takes longer and those vital milliseconds could make the difference between getting your shot and missing it; and you really don’t want to lose the spontaneity of the moment.

• Secondly, the image quality you’ll get from a prime lens is nearly always superior to what you’d get from a zoom.

• Thirdly, as primes have far less glass than zooms - and often have less electronic circuitry - they tend to be smaller, lighter and quieter - and they’re often more durable and reliable.

• And finally, a fixed focal length lens gives me a wider depth of field at any given aperture than I’d get from a zoom lens, which I find particularly useful as I usually want a fair amount of front-to-back sharpness in my images.

So, you’re probably getting the message that I use prime lenses. But what about focal length? Usually, in street photography, we give some importance to context and the background in our scene more often than not contributes something useful to the frame. Remember - you have a full frame to fill, not just that bit in the middle. A wide-angle lens will allow me to take in the wider picture. And, more importantly, it forces me to get closer to the subject. By getting in close, your images will have much more sense of emotion - or drama - or intimacy - than they would have if you were shooting from across the road with a long lens.

So my go-to lens for street photography is, more often than not a 35mm prime - and I mean 35mm in full-frame terms, so it would be this 23mm with my APS-C crop sensor X-Pro3 for example. This focal length gives me a perspective which isn't too far from what the human eye sees - so it’s a realistic perspective. Sometimes I’ll go even wider - maybe 24 or 28mm (again in full frame terms) for a more dramatic feel. I really enjoy using the 28mm on the streets and love its fluidity and its expansiveness.

Sometimes, if I’m shooting the streets at night I’ll use a slightly longer focal length, such as the Fujifilm 56mm f/1.2 (85mm equivalent) which will help me pick out what’s important in the frame. The other benefit in using primes at night is that they’re usually faster and I can open the lens up to the max.

But if you’re just getting into street photography - and this is one of the best bits of advice I can give you - don’t faff around with lots of different lenses. Get to know one lens really, really well. Well enough so that your eyes will start to see like that lens - your brain will start to think like it. Everything will start to feel so natural, so fluid, so instinctive, that you’ll get to the point that by the time you bring the camera up to your eye, you'll already know exactly what your frame is going to look like. You’ll know how that lens describes the world without even thinking about it. And that’s when the magic starts to happen. It’s liberating!

Check out my YouTube video on the best lens for street photography.