Better street lens?

princecody said:

Olympus 12mm or Panasonic Leica 15mm?

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Oly 17mm or Voigtländer 17.5mm.

12mm or 15mm may be a bit too wide. 12mm definitely is.

In the narrow streets common in much of Europe, the 12mm may be a reasonable option.

Not having used the PL15 but having the Oly17, I always want a little wider. The Oly12 risks distorting people too much if you're using it for quick snapshots.

Oly 17, Sigma 19, or Panny 20?

I have read the above replies & find it interesting the difference in opinions. So for what its worth, my opinion based on my lenses.

Pany 14/2.5, way too wide,

Sigma 19/2.8, OK after it wakes up but sometimes too wide,

Oly 25/1.8, best fit for me,

Sigma 30/2.8, nice but often too long in crowded environments.

Panny 20 or Panny 12-32?

It depends on what you aim to do in street photography. The quintessential focal length for that purpose in m43 is 17mm-- you can get something like that with the PL15mm, Oly 17mm f/1.8, Sigma 19mm f/2.8, Panasonic 20mm f/1.7 (there's also the older Olympus 17mm f/2.8, but that's probably the weakest lens in the system and you'll do better with almost anything else including the 14-42 kit lens). The 17mm ballpark works pretty well for full body portraiture and architecture.

I really like the rendering I've seen from the 17mm f/1.8. Out of all of them, it's the one I want most.

I don't do street candid portraiture, I find the genre as usually demonstrated to be too random, voyeuristic and without real meaning. But that's just me. When I just want to shoot with small lenses, I'm pretty happy with my Sigma 19mm and 30mm f/2.8 and I don't really want for anything else.

From the tone of the other replies, though, I have a sneaking feeling that by "street photography" a lot of us here are thinking "photographs of streets" as opposed to subjects encountered while walking amidst streets. Very odd. If your subject is the streetscape, I'd just use the usual landscape photography rules, which are: any lens goes. I usually use the 11-22 and 14-54.

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http://www.photoklarno.com

Hence the range of answers you're getting. For the wide boulevards of Paris, 17, 20 or 25. For narrower streets, the 15 (but don't underestimate Panasonic's 14 f2.5). The 12 seems awfully niche to me. Useful in an UWA zoom, but as the one focal length you have with you?

princecody said:

Olympus 12mm or Panasonic Leica 15mm?

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Supposedly the ultimate street lens is a 35mm or in our case the Olympus 17mm; it sits right on the line of wide and standard. One of my favorite street cameras that I still have is a Canonet GIII QL17 which comes with a fixed 40mm f2.0 lens. So to me the Sigma 19mm or the Panasonic 20mm would also be excellent choices. I'm waiting for the Sigma 19mm black version which is on backorder. I have the Sigma 60mm and 30mm and they both have fast autofocus, and excellent IQ.

However, for some strange reason, I bought the 12mm when I got my E-M10 and found it makes a great street lens; sharp, excellent IQ, amazingly fast autofocus, and very well built. I have even done a few casual portraits but you have to get real close to your subject and pay attention to distortion. I would expect that the Panasonic-Leica 15mm would also be an excellent lens.

Of course, great street shooters like Henri Cartier Bresson used rangefinders with 50mm lenses or in our case 25mm. Several more great choices to add to the confusion. I think the wider lenses are a better choice for the entire street view and the narrower lenses for focusing in on the people you see.

Bill S.
Digital film is cheap; shoot fast and shoot often!!!

Heh, I'll jump to the extreme and say that I like the 7-14 for street shooting, at least in the daytime. At f/4 almost everything is in focus, I can hold the camera in my right hand hanging down at my side (with a wrist strap for security) and take discreet photos without drawing attention. I'll crop as desired (generally don't need 16MP images anyway), and I like the perspective of shots taken from that height.

This is in the town of Poffabro in Northern Italy. The last time I was there I made a lot of use of my 11-22, mostly at 11mm. Towns like this are not uncommon in the older parts of Europe.

Mark

No love for the small Panny 12-32? I am interested in a small walk around lens for street shooting. The size and weight savings interest me. The 11-22 is an awesome lens, but very large (I do love the images it produces!).

No manual focus on the 12-32 with older bodies like mine. Otherwise it is a very useful focal length range. You may also want something a bit faster in the early evening or other poor light.

I just looked at your gear list. Get the Samyang. It's fun and sharp!

I bought the 9mm bodycap a few months ago. It is fun too. In some ways the 140 degree view may be better than the full 180 though of course it is just a bodycap and not as sharp as a regular lens.

Mark

Mark Thornton said:

In the narrow streets common in much of Europe, the 12mm may be a reasonable option.

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12mm is nice to have in some situations, but I wouldn't use it all the time.

I've been to Eurpoe several times in the past year +… Paris, Marseille, Genoa, Brussels, Ghent, Bruges and Antwerp, as well as small villages in and around Provence. In Paris, I used a variety of wide and standard lenses… 7-14mm, 12mm, 25mm. The 12mm I used a bit, swapping between it and a 25mm, but it was frustrating, because neither was quite right.

Once I picked up a 17.5mm, it proved to be the real workhorse, taking over 40% of my shots with it. I leave the 25mm at home now. The 7-14mm is great, especially during the day and for all but the darkest interiors (for that, my SLR Magic 12mm T1.6 is perfect), but often even at 14mm it's a bit too wide.

There is no good or bad lens for street photography.

A long time ago, interchangeable-lens cameras didn't exist. So great street photographs from the past used the lens fixed on their cameras. They usually select the camera and tried to live with the lens fixed on it.

Today, people doing street photography have a wide selection of lenses available to them. Some of them prefer telenses. But their works look more like street portraits to me, rather than street photography.

Street photography has its own aesthetic. It's not just photos taken on the street; it's photos that show how life appears on the public spaces of a specific city. Moreover, in front of a good shot, the viewer should have the impression to be there, to be part of the action.

Moreover, in my view, a good shot is one that captures main subjects in a specific sociologic context. That can be done with wide-angle lenses, normal lenses and, up to a point, with weak telelenses.

So the choice is wide. Should it be 12mm, 14mm, 15mm, 17mm, 19mm, 20mm or 25mm? Who cares? Pick one and do what great photographs from the past did: be creative.

At the end of this article (written in French), there are 15 photos that shows what I mean:
http://jpmartel.wordpress.com/2012/10/31/voyage-a-la-havane-deuxieme-jour/

princecody said:

Olympus 12mm or Panasonic Leica 15mm?

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For the price of one of these lenses you can get a Ricoh GR which is better for street photography than m43 cameras because of its completely silent leaf shutter and advanced manual focus options and tiny inconspicuous size, and the lens is ultra ultra sharp.