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