The Best Three Lenses You Should Have For Travel Photography
Having the right lens especially when you’re traveling is very essential if you want to capture stunning photos.
In short, there are actually three lenses you should have if you are a professional travel photographer.
Read through this great article, check out the photos shot with respective lenses and let us know what you think!
The only three lenses you need for travel photography anywhere in the world are a fisheye lens, a 50mm, and a 135mm (or similar telephoto).
You can agree and finish this article right here, or you can read on to see exactly why I would choose only these three lenses to take with me anywhere in the world.
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The Canon Fisheye 15mm f/2.8
From Moscow, Russia
The Canon 15mm lens is my antidote to boring building pictures. When traveling abroad (or around your own town/city/village), interesting buildings are inevitably photographed. Oh, that old bridge with locks attached to it? Better take a picture.
Oh, look at that old cathedral in the Kremlin, better take a picture. If it’s there, it must be important. Well, you can add your photo to 1.5 million other photographs right there on Flickr or Google images that look exactly like the one you just took.
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The 50mm f/1.4
A garden scene in Moscow, Russia taken with the 50mm f/1.4. Such lovely bokeh!
The 50mm lens is a standard, go-to, all-around lens. And while the Fisheye lens brings a lot of whimsy and fun to my travel pictures, some scenes just don’t call for that. I’ve heard it said that the 50mm is the closest representation to what we see naturally with our eyes.
This lens is my best choice of the three options for Canon 50mm lenses. For only about $300, this lens has fantastic optics and a powerful aperture. It’s made of real glass lenses unlike the cheaper, lower quality 50mm f/1.8. And it focuses fast, unlike the much more expensive 50mm f/1.2, which happens to be twice as heavy.
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The 135mm f/2.0
My host on the left, after we road horseback from one village to the next, in Mongolia. Taken with the 135mm f/2.0
The granddaddy of all these lenses, the 135mm f/2.0 has a special POW feel to it. Because it is a telephoto, it pulls the background in for a nice compact feel to the images. It is a great portrait lens as it completely obliterates the background in a sea of dreamy bokeh.
And one special fact about the Canon 135mm f/2.0: it has the ability to focus at a distance of 1 meter (3 feet), which makes it almost like a macro lens.
