Street Photography With A Telephoto Lens

Or at least a longer focal length than conventional wisdom suggests. I’m always reading that so-called street photography is best undertaken with a prime lens within the 35mm to 50mm range and I understand the merits of this range for reasons I will elaborate on further down. But convention is naturally a gauntlet that Alpha Whiskey cannot ignore. So before meeting my date I decided to kill an hour in town the other night shooting with a telephoto zoom and mostly at the maximum focal length (210mm: 420mm equivalent field of view).

Selfie generation.

‘So-called street photography’ because it often has vague definitions, typically settling around an observation of random incidents or encounters in public places, either with or without people. As I’ve said a few times in the past a lot of what is posted online as street photography, its artistic merit notwithstanding, seem like a lot of random shots of nothing in particular. Call me Mr Picky but I prefer my images to have a definite subject and I try to reveal something as well as just make an observation. Admittedly these images may have failed in that endeavour.