Professional photographer Phillip Van Nostrand knows all about travel photography.
In this article over at Digital Photography School he explains why he would take only these 3 lenses with him, and still have what it takes to shoot spectacular images in every occasion. While he is referring to Canon lenses, you can find equal focal lengths from most manufacturers. Read more to see if you agree with him.
The Canon Fisheye 15mm f/2.8
The Canon 15mm lens is my antidote to boring building pictures. When traveling abroad (or around your own town/city/village), interesting buildings are inevitably photographed. Oh, that old bridge with locks attached to it? Better take a picture. Oh, look at that old cathedral in the Kremlin, better take a picture. If it’s there, it must be important. Well, you can add your photo to 1.5 million other photographs right there on Flickr or Google images that look exactly like the one you just took.
What will you do to differentiate yourself? How can you take a picture that will make someone pause for more than half a second? Ad companies are excited when someone spends 4-8 seconds looking at a photo. Can you get someone to look at one photo for that long? What would it take? For me, I decided I would never take boring, straight photos of buildings ever again. I’d either edit them in unusual ways (like creating an HDR image, or process it in very contrasted black and white), at unusual times of day, or I would attempt to photograph it differently than every other tourist before me.
The 135mm f/2.0
The granddaddy of all these lenses, the 135mm f/2.0 has a special POW feel to it. Because it is a telephoto, it pulls the background in for a nice compact feel to the images. It is a great portrait lens as it completely obliterates the background in a sea of dreamy bokeh. And one special fact about the Canon 135mm f/2.0: it has the ability to focus at a distance of 1 meter (3 feet), which makes it almost like a macro lens.
This lens is fun for me because it has similar properties to the 70-200mm, but it weighs nearly half as much, which will save your back and shoulders after a long day of walking around. This is a fun lens to spy on people from afar, if you are afraid of the straight-on street style encounters you get with the 50mm. This is actually a really interesting lens to do landscapes with if you have enough room.
The 50mm f/1.4
The 50mm lens is a standard, go-to, all-around lens. And while the Fisheye lens brings a lot of whimsy and fun to my travel pictures, some scenes just don’t call for that. I’ve heard it said that the 50mm is the closest representation to what we see naturally with our eyes. This lens is my best choice of the three options for Canon 50mm lenses. For only about $300, this lens has fantastic optics and a powerful aperture. It’s made of real glass lenses unlike the cheaper, lower quality 50mm f/1.8. And it focuses fast, unlike the much more expensive 50mm f/1.2, which happens to be twice as heavy.
Read the full article over at Digital Photography School.
Source: Digital Photography School
