Photo How To

Street shooters work differently than landscape and portrait photographers, who typically have plenty of time to set up their shot and make thoughtful decisions about exposure, focus, and composition. Street photography, on the other hand, is all about timing and working fast, to capture fleeting moments as they occur.

While there is no single “perfect lens” for all forms of photography, a few lenses offer more versatility, image quality, portability, and bang for the buck than others. One such lens is the 50mm “Nifty Fifty” we featured in a recent Shutterbug video, and as you’ll see in the video below, another is the 135mm f/2 short telephoto.

Forget resolutions—those are just fanciful promises that may or may not be remembered when spring reappears. Instead, make a list of things to do now, within a finite timeframe, and start doing them. 

Sometimes it’s better to be lucky than smart. For me, luck means getting a decent picture even though I use precisely the wrong settings, or when I use exactly the wrong equipment for the situation. Yep, I admit that I benefit from luck a lot. 

Q. The idea of shooting in Raw on your DSLR and then importing those Raw images into your tablet or phone to edit is pretty ludicrous to me. I don’t know of anyone who has enough free space on their mobile phone to edit even a day’s worth of vacation shooting. Are people really buying into this?

There’s been a growing trend among digital photographers to use vintage lenses on modern mirrorless cameras. Why would you want to do that? Among other reasons is that old manual focus lenses often sell for a fraction of the cost of their current autofocus counterparts, and the necessary adapters are both abundant and affordable.

If there’s one bit of advice we’ve all heard a million times, it’s “Be sure and use a tripod.” Yet, despite the fact that sharp images are the goal of just about everyone, it’s sort of amazing how many times photographers “forget” to bring along a tripod.