Lenses Essential

For every photography tour I lead, I send out a color eBooklet with pictures and text describing what participants can expect during the trip. I always include a list of recommended equipment and, of course, I itemize the ideal lenses I feel would produce the best images based on where the tour goes and the subjects we’ll encounter. Invariably, clients write me asking if they can ‘get away with’ carrying a lens or two less than my recommendations.

As we age, weight becomes an important issue. At some point, it’s just not possible, without a lot of back, neck, shoulder, or hip pain, to carry a lot of gear. Therefore, I certainly understand the questions I get about how to minimize the lenses we carry without, hopefully, compromising our picture taking ability.

If I were writing this article 10 years ago, the conclusions I would draw from what’s available to photographers would be different than today. As technology gives us more and better options, we have to re-examine how we approach photography.

Option 1: The easy approach

When smart phones were first released with a built-in camera, serious photographers recognized that the quality of the images just wouldn’t measure up to the standards we’ve grown accustomed to with Canon, Nikon, Sony, and Fuji. If you wanted to make an enlargement for home decor, there was no way smart phone images looked good beyond, perhaps, an 11 x 14 inch print. But times and technology have changed.

Smart phones that are scheduled to be released in the last quarter of 2023, like the iPhone 15 and the new Tesla Pi, are truly remarkable. Even though I’ve been using Apple’s iPhones for years, I am particularly interested in the Tesla Pi. It is rumored to have a camera that boasts an astonishing 108 megapixels, it will be able to connect to Starlink so you can have an Internet connection anywhere in the world while bypassing local networks, and it will have a longer optical telephoto that should be quite impressive.

The phenominal resolution and quality of Pi’s images plus it’s range of focal lengths from ultra wide to telephoto make a compelling argument for a lot of people to only use a smartphone like this when traveling, photographing the family, and shooting nature. For special circumstances such as capturing birds in flight, smartphones aren’t going to work. The Tesla Pi is supposed to have a continuous shooting mode, but since the camera phone hasn’t been released yet, no one knows the frame rate. The phone probably won’t have a super fast shutter speed required when photographing birds in flight, but aside from this one aspect of picture taking, I think a smartphone like the Tesla Pi may make the burden of carrying a lot of gear unnecessary.

The two photographs on pages 4 and 5 were taken with my iPhone 13. They look really good, but imagine if I had used the Pi. They would be exponentially better.

Option 2: The traditional approach

If you are married to the traditonal way of taking pictures with a 35mm digital format camera, and using a smartphone for serious photography just doesn’t work for you, I’d recommend carrying two lenses: A wide angle zoom plus a telephoto zoom. One lens stays on the camera, so you will essentially carry a camera and one extra lens. The question is, of course, what focal lengths are ideal to cover as much of the focal length range as possible.

I find that a 24-105mm lens (or 24-120mm) plus a telephoto zoom in the 100-400mm range covers pretty much everything except for an extreme wide angle and an extreme telephoto. For my photography tour to Venice, Italy during carnival, for example, where subjects vary from individual portraits to group portraits, and from architecture to nightscapes, these two lenses work out great. The photo above was taken with a 27mm focal length.

Alternatively, you can substitute the 24-105mm range with a 16-35mm wide angle zoom. This forgoes the middle range -- from 35mm to 100mm -- but the tradeoff is that a 16mm focal length offers a lot of creative possibilities. The picture on page 8 of Mabry Mill in Virginia was taken with a 16mm focal length. You can see how disproportionately large the foreground is compared to the background. This wide angle exaggeration of perspective enables you to take