Some Street Portraits

britcam wrote:

Would the 70-300 not have done an equally good job? Much lighter and more compact than the 50-140. I use my 55-200 on my XS10 using single AF point on the for this sort of shot …

Yeah, I've seen samples of the 70-300 and it's indeed a very high quality lens. However, it's f/4-5.6, unlike constant f/2.8 of the 50-140, or even wider f/2 of the 90. That will affect the DoF and thus the 70-300/4-5.6 is not as good at subject separation as the 50-140/2.8 or 90/2. Also, the wider apertures do better in low light.

For street portraits, the zoom is nice to frame tighter to faces without getting too close, the 50-140 is a good range for that. But if I'm too far away with the 70-300, I'll likely have to deal with obstacles and it's harder to change the angle (think of the subject as the center of a circle, I need to move more to change angle if the radius/distance is longer)

I'm not sure how people take street shots, but I prefer getting close, thus I'd go with the Tamron 17-70/2.8 instead. Take a group standing in a circle for example, I can certainly zoom in from far away, but I'd get only a bunch of backs. If I get closer to the circle, I can get a lot of faces with the perspective of being part of the circle.

any further, the gap/window would be too small to capture the subject. Could have moved in a little closer.

f/2.8 is good for indoor/low-light shots