Earlier today I read a comment by someone who understands the appeal of small, cropped-sensor mirrorless cameras but wondered, “What’s the charm that gets people excited about FF mirrorless?” The writer pointed out that size/weight advantages of mirrorless are diminished in full-frame mirrorless cameras, where one would likely use larger lenses, and that the electronic viewfinder (EVF) displays and shorter battery life seem like disadvantages by comparison to full frame DSLRs.
The answers to somewhat complex and subjective. I provided a rather short answer to the question in the original venue… but only after writing and deleting a longer reply (too long for that forum) that now forms the basis of what follows.
You are right to note that mirrorless (and DSLR) systems both have pluses and minuses. Reading what some write about this subject, you might start to think that the distinctions are black and white, where A is always better — unless the writer prefers B, in which B is always better in every way.
It is actually more nuanced than that, and we are in a period of transition where mirrorless systems are changing faster than DSLR systems — meaning that the former may not yet be up to speed in some areas for some users, but that they are rapidly becoming more competent and may be the better choice for more photographers than in the past.
(I use both mirrorless and DSLR systems. In some cases I prefer my mirrorless system. In other cases I prefer my DSLR. Other photographers I know feel differently. For example, I prefer my mirrorless system for street photography, but I often find myself with folks using small DSLRs. I’ve stood side-by-side with photographers using mirrorless cameras to photograph birds in flight while I used a DSLR.)
Note: I originally published this article under the title, “Thinking About Travel Photography Gear.” Since I’m planning a separate article about travel photography camera options, I have renamed this article to acknowledge its focus lenses.
Recently I’ve noted people trying to determine what gear will work well for photography while traveling, and especially wondering about what lenses to take. I do a fair amount of travel photography, and I’ll going to summarize a few approaches that can work.
But first, since what follows will mostly focus on lenses, let me say a few things about cameras, while recognizing that this will be far from an in-depth consideration.
Cameras
What is “the best” travel camera? That is a tough question, and it might be better rephrased as “what is the best travel camera for me?” Is photography your main reason for traveling, do you simply want to record the experience, or something else? Are you traveling alone, with other photographers, or with others whose interest in photography doesn’t match your own? Do you prefer to travel “heavy” — multiple bags and checked luggage — or you an ultra-light traveler who prefers to stick to carry-on only, even for long trips? Do you think of yourself as a scenic photographer, a people photographer, a street photographer, or something else?
With all of these possible variations, the right answer could be anything from your smart phone camera to a large, multiple lens system with tripod, or any of a number of intermediate options.
Chinatown, New York City
As a photographer, I’m not ready to give up good quality equipment that allows me to shoot my preferred subjects and make large prints from the images I bring back. Yet I also prefer to travel light, going “carry-on luggage only” even for multi-week overseas trips. The best solution for me has turned out to be a 1.5x cropped sensor mirrorless body with a small selection of lenses, mostly primes sometimes augmented by a zoom.
There’s a lot more to say about camera choice, but here I”m going to focus primarily on lenses you might use with a full frame or cropped sensor system. (Watch for another article focusing on camera options.)
Lenses for Travel
Rather than trying to answer the “what lens should I bring?” question, I’ll suggest a few approaches and briefly describe some pluses and minuses of each.
One zoom lens
A single zoom lens that covers sufficient focal length range, preferably with IS and a f/2.8 aperture might be all you need. While such a lens is not small, it is quite versatile. Especially if the lens — or your camera body – has image stabilization (IS) it will work in relatively low light in many situations, and it can work for everything from casual portraits to wide-angle photographs in constrained spaces. A “mid range zoom” lens can do the trick, whether it is one of the ubiquitous “kit zooms” or a more expensive f/2.8 zoom.
Pluses
One lens stays on the body all the time.
IS helps with handheld shots in low light.
The lens covers focal lengths most often needed.
Good image quality. Weight and bulk are less of an issue if you stick on only one lens.
Minuses
These lenses are not small.
You will give up some ultra-wide and telephoto options.
A big lens can make you look like a “photo tourist.”
Largest apertures not as big as you could get from primes.
No backup lens if this lens has a problem.
If you will only use one lens, you could get a smaller camera with a built-in zoom
A woman walks into an alley past a smoking bicyclist, Florence/Firenze, Italy
One zoom lens with large focal length range
Some zoom lenses cover a very large focal length range (18-300mm!) with variable aperture. As with the first option, this provides a great deal of versatility for folks who want a larger selection of focal lengths, but who don’t want to mess with multiple lenses.
Pluses
One lens stays on the body the entire time.
Decent (but probably not stellar) IQ.
Excellent focal length coverage for diverse subjects.
Minuses
Not the best lenses in optical terms, though may be good enough for many purposes.
Lenses can be relatively large.
Poor low light options. (Use flash?)
Big lens can make you look like a “photo tourist.”
No backup lens if your lens has a problem.
A single prime
Before the era of zoom lenses, it was not unusual for photographers to head out with only a single prime lens with a decently large aperture. (This could be an interchangeable lens camera with a single prime or a rangefinder style camera with a fixed focal length built-in lens.)
Pluses
The ultimate in simplicity and light weight.
Excellent image quality.
Good low light coverage with a large aperture.
You may look less like a tourist.
Minuses
No focal length flexibility. (Though some systems allow add on telephoto and wide angle converters.)
No backup lens if your lens has a problem.
A man making soap bubbles for the crowd in London
A few primes
Pluses
Can be small and light.
Good low light coverage.
Excellent image quality.
You may look less like a tourist.
Minuses
A few small primes may add up to the weight/bulk of one zoom.
Need to switch lenses more often.
Less focal length flexibility than a zoom.
Multiple zooms
Pluses
Lots of flexibility.
Good zooms provide excellent image quality.
Minuses
System quickly balloons in size and weight.
Probably need speciality photographic bag or backpack.
You not only look like a tourist… you look like a tourist carrying lots of expensive stuff, which is not always ideal.
Zoom(s) augmented by a large aperture prime
One zoom can cover ranges where flexibility is desired, and a smaller prime can provide a larger aperture option.
Pluses
You get the flexibility of a zoom.
You get the large aperture of a prime.
Fine image quality.
Minuses
Do you take a prime in the focal length range of your zoom (for low light) or a different range (covering different uses.)?
Multiple lenses to juggle.
Weight and bulk increase a bit.
The Karl Theodor Bridge, the old bridge, the Heiliggeistekirche, and portions of Altstadt-Heidelberg, Germany
Primes augmented by (most likely one) zoom.
For example, take primes for core use, but add a zoom telephoto.
Pluses
Good image quality.
Small and light system with primes for most photography.
You look less like a tourist when using the primes.
Focal length flexibility in range covered by the zoom.
Minuses
Not as small and light as primes-only system.
The not-a-tourist impression is lost when you attach that zoom!
The Answer
I know you’d like The Best Answer… but there isn’t one! No solution is perfect, and each photographer will likely balance the pluses and minuses in a different way.
What I do
Even though I use a full frame Canon DSLR system for most of my non-travel photography, these days I always rely on a smaller mirrorless system for my travel and street photography. This system mostly is built around primes of moderately wide to moderately long focal lengths, with lenses that are fairly small. In some cases I augment this with a single longer focal length zoom. The entire kit, plus my small laptop and a few other items, fits into a medium-size messenger bag that goes under the seat on flights.
It has been a while since I posted an article in my “Photographic Myths And Platitudes” series — so here is a new one! It is a bit different than some of the previous posts in that it is based on something I wrote elsewhere in response to a lengthy (and long-winded!) discussion that suggested hyper-awareness of the so-called diffraction-limited aperture.
What is the diffraction-limited aperture, you ask? It is a real thing — not a myth — though it is sometimes over-emphasized by overzealous techno-photographers. In simple terms, as you stop down a lens its potential maximum resolution declines as a result of diffraction blur. (Keep in mind that other factors affect sharpness, too. Also, this happens to every lens, from the cheapest to the most expensive — it is a universal optical phenomenon.) At some aperture, the increase in blur becomes significant enough, in a technical sense, to be more of a “limitation” on image sharpness than the ability of the sensor to record detail — e.g. the “number of megapixels” of the sensor. A simplistic interpretation of the concept suggests that a photographer should avoid other apertures in order to “get the sharpest image.”
As with many things in photography, it isn’t that clear-cut.
Now on to my original post. It is a bit technical, though I think most photographers should be able to follow it — and I will conclude with some simple, straightforward practical advice. (And here I remind readers that sharpness is not the most important, much less the only important thing in photography. Far from it!)
Sharpness, or at least the perception of sharpness, is a more complex thing than choosing the aperture the provides (to the extent that this can be determined) the highest optical resolution at the sensor plane, measured at either a) the best performing point in the frame, or b) the average across the frame.
(Speaking of “the extent that this can be determined,” I wonder how folks would answer the following question: Which is “sharper,” the image with the best center resolution but slightly lower corner resolution or the image with slightly less center resolution but better overall resolution across the frame?)
While we might consider whether f/16 will be softer than f/8 on some lens/camera combination — it almost certainly will be softer — it isn’t irrelevant to ask: “How much softer, and will this affect my print?” In quite a few cases the difference in maximum resolution in the print will be essentially invisible. In other words, while you will get optimal resolution at some particular aperture, you will actually still get extremely good print resolution at a smaller (or larger) aperture, too.
If there is no particular photographic reason to choose a smaller (or larger!) aperture, you might as well use whatever aperture you think will produce the highest resolution. That best resolution aperture will vary based on the lens you are using, the camera format, and arguably the photo site density of the sensor. To generalize, if you are shooting full frame it will probably be somewhere in the f/5.6-f/8 range with many lenses. (Other things can affect that — for example, what the maximum aperture of the lens is.) On a cropped sensor camera you could, in many cases, use either the same aperture or guess at one stop larger or so — while realizing that there could be resolution downsides to going larger with some lenses. Trade-offs abound! (I’ll spare you the technical discussion of all of the variables. You can think me later.)
But, seriously, if you are calculating the “sharpest” aperture to the closest 1/3-stop for each lens and using that aperture in the field and avoiding others that are slightly different, you probably aren’t really gaining anything significant from your efforts, and you may be sacrificing things that could make your photographs better.
A photographer and friend asked me for my thoughts on mini medium format, or “miniMF,” camera systems. I told her the answer was complex and that I’d write it up at the blog. Here it is!
I have attempted to include several things in the article: a bit of background regarding formats, some objective facts (“the numbers”) about them and their relationships, pluses and minuses of various options, my own current subjective thoughts on what this means to me, and a few alternative perspectives.
The evolution of digital medium format cameras has been among the most interesting photographic developments over the past few years. High MP backs from companies like Phase One and Leaf became the high-end standard for digital image making, and other companies have recently entered the market. The larger sensors may provide improved image quality in several ways: greater system resolution, greater pixel resolution, improved dynamic range, less noise, and more.
It wasn’t that long ago that digital formats larger than full frame were out of reach for nearly all photographers, with costs that were frequently many tens of thousands of dollars, often for only the digital back, which had to be attached to a medium format body.
However, in the last few years several manufacturers have driven down the cost of camera systems using larger-than-full-frame sensors, and now digital “medium format” (more on that term in a moment) bodies are available for less than $7000. A range of manufacturers are now in this market, including Fujifilm, Pentax, and Hasselblad.
When the costs of larger sensor bodies were in the mid-$20k and up (sometimes very up) range, few photographers using full frame DSLR or mirrorless cameras could realistically consider them as options. But the current $6500-$9000 price isn’t that much higher than the most expensive full frame bodies. At these prices the potential improvements in image quality are enough to make folks take a closer look, especially if they are photographers who produce large and high quality prints on a regular basis.
I began to pay attention when the miniMF Pentax 645d came out some years ago (though I was a bit disappointed to find out that the sensor wasn’t really “645” size), and my interest only increased as Pentax updated to the 645z and then as Fujifilm and Hasselblad brought out competing products. I thought a lot about the possible value of such systems for my photography, and I considered getting one. I haven’t done ao — though I won’t rule it out in the future — but I would like to share some of my musings about the choices. Continue reading Mini Medium Format… or Not?→
Photographer and visual opportunist. Daily photos since 2005, plus articles, reviews, news, and ideas.
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