The one-lens argument is usually presented as an aesthetic discipline, which makes it sound like self-denial. It is more boring and more useful than that: every time you change a lens you stop looking, and the thing you were looking at goes away.
A street has a duration. The man with the ladder is on the corner for about nine seconds. If you spend six of them deciding between 35mm and 85mm, you have a photograph of a corner.
Taken at 1/15th because there was no second option to reach for. Photo: Fotios Photos.
What to take
- One body, one lens, in the 28mm to 40mm range. Wide enough for a street, long enough for a face at three metres.
- Two batteries. Cold halves them and you will be out all day.
- A cloth. Salt, dust, rain, fingerprints — in that order of frequency.
- No bag. A bag means the camera is in the bag.
The best travel photographs are almost never of the thing you went to see. They are of the twenty minutes before or after it, and you have to be holding the camera during those.
The honest limitation
You will miss the wildlife, the stage-lit interior and the compressed mountain shot. That is three photographs a trip. Weigh them against the two hundred you will take because the camera was in your hand rather than in a bag on your back, and the arithmetic is not close.
