Walk Around Camera Lenses
One Good All-Purpose Lens Means Having Less To Carry
You will see the term "walk around camera lenses" on a lot of forums and other photography websites. But what does it mean?
Pretty straight forward really, but what is a good lens to have for simply walking around with? Which lens will cover the focal lengths required to capture images of the everyday objects and scenes that we see all around us? Nothing special, just:
What if I am just popping out somewhere non-photography related but I want to take my camera "just in case"? I normally plonk on a 24-70mm lens to my full frame DSLR. It covers wide-angle to short telephoto meaning that should I come across something worth snapping, I am ready.
The 24mm end is great for landscapes, interiors, exterior property shots and so on. The 70mm end is excellent for cropping in that little bit which is particularly useful for portraits. To be honest, the 24-70mm L F2.8 lens stays on my Canon EOS 5D Mark IV 90% of the time. This is especially so at weddings and is by far my most used lens.
Similarly, the 24-105mm Macro stays on my Panasonic S1H mostly.
I have gone out with just a wide angle or just a telephoto lens before, and found myself out on a limb without the correct lens focal length.
Other decent walk around camera lenses include;
Although the last 2 are quite heavy on your camera and the last one, in your wallet. But what a lens!
Personally, as I own Canon cameras, my favourite walk around lens is the Canon EF 24-70mm L 2.8. It has weather sealing and ultra quiet movement in the focussing. It is fairly robust and once fell out of my camera bag onto a marble floor from 1m up and survived quite well. All it had was a slight dent on the filter ring.
Bear in mind that this is quite a hefty lens but well worth the extra weight due to the amazing image quality. One other nice point about this lens is that is has reasonable macro facilities, you are not able to get as close as pure macro lenses, but good enough none the less.