Get more from your lenses

Angela Nicholson explains how to make the most of your wideangle and telephoto lenses

- Angela Nicholson

1 Use motion blur

Thanks to modern in-camera stabilisation systems, you don't always have to set up a tripod to use shutter speeds long enough to combine motion blur with sharp details in street photography. Ross Grieve is a portrait, commercial, and street photographer, and a Lumix Ambassador, and says, 'I love to shoot at 1/15sec to capture the blur of passers-by. I shoot in manual-exposure mode, so I have full control, but the shutter speed is the key to capturing these motion-blur shots. I vary the sensitivity (ISO) setting depending upon the light conditions. I shoot handheld but my Lumix GX9's stabilisation keeps the buildings and stationary objects sharp while anything moving is blurred.' Ross Grieve, www.rossgrieve.com

2 How wide should you go?

Lenses are classed as wideangle optics when they capture a wider angle of view than we see with our naked eyes. Our eyes are equivalent to a lens with a focal length of around 43mm on a full-frame camera or 28mm on an APS-C format model, so any lens shorter than that is a wideangle. 35mm lenses and their APS-C format equivalent (23mm) are very popular for a wide range of photography genres, but especially the street. Landscape photographers tend to prefer something a bit wider still, perhaps 24mm or 21mm, or occasionally even shorter. Corrected 12-24mm lenses are also popular, however uncorrected fisheye lenses that produce images with dramatic curves or even circular images at focal lengths as short as 8mm, are best used sparingly.

3 Activate your camera's electronic level

With a wide angle of view, it can be hard to keep an eye on the horizon so it often ends up a little wonky. Thankfully, most cameras have an electronic level which you can activate to help with keeping the horizon level. Many electronic levels also indicate if the camera is tipped slightly up or down this can help to avoid converging verticals.