UKC

As the title suggests -

What is your favourite lens for rock climbing and why?
How do you use it?

I'm trying to decide on limiting myself to taking just two lenses on trips, and trying to decide which ones to take.

In reply to yh001:

My favourite two by a long way are Zeiss Batis 25 and 85mm for Sony A7.The late Galen Rowell wrote that he could have got the vast majority of his best selling shots with just 2 lenses; 24 and 85mm. I have various lenses but find I do gravitate to these 2 focal lengths and find the limit of 2 primes does make you think a lot more about the shots rather than just zooming in.

In reply to yh001:

200 mm 2.8

In reply to yh001:

the lenses I use most for climbing would be the tokina 11-16mm 2.8 and nikon 85mm 1.8.
If I had to choose two primes for Climbing it would probably be either FF a 20mm/24mm and the 85mm

In reply to jethro kiernan:

Beat me to it with the Tokina suggestion. I'd say 90% of my shots were taken with it.

In reply to yh001:

Pentax 16-85 zoom on a Pentax K3ii cropped sensor body. Covers everything I need whilst photographing hanging from a rope... I don't want to mess about changing lenses, frees me to concentrate on getting the shot.

In reply to yh001:

Mine's a rose-tinted one

In reply to atrendall:

Can I assume you never crop either?

In reply to Robert Durran:

Try not too but if things are a bit out of kilter or there's something I didn't notice around the edge then I'd crop.

In reply to atrendall:

Sorry, but I just don't understand it when people say that avoiding zooms makes them think more about their photos and therefore, presumably, improve composition. I would have thought that zooms give more options and therefore more possibilities for thinking about composition.

In reply to Fraser:


It is a lovely lens... certainly most of my landscapes and climbing pics are from that lens

In reply to jethro kiernan:


Is that on a crop sensor body?

In reply to Robert Durran:

I have no aversion to zooming and agee that primes don't make you consider the shot more. I don't understand that ethos of getting the perfect shot from the camera either.
I do plenty of post-editing where it's worth while and crop anyway. So the suggestion of a 16mm (I own an 18mm) and an 80mm makes sense with two logical focal lengths. If I could afford a top tier zoom lens I would buy one, but with my budget and my interests in photography outside of climbing I'd much rather own two decent primes.

In reply to Robert Durran:

I agree. If you have the luxury of being able to walk about a bit to frame your shot with a prime, you're generally not in a good position to capture the climbing action! There are very often physical constraints limiting where you can get to take the right picture, usually the presence or absence of a big chuck of rock, or the end of the rope, or the prospect of casting a visible shadow into frame.

In reply to Jon Read:
If using primes I find my 15mm and 50mm (APS C) a great combination. Both compact enough to improve ease of use. Even to take on a route with a compact body. I find a cropped image from either gives a better image than using a zoom to get an uncropped image. Particularly in contrast, saturation flare resistance etc due to fewer elements , better coating and wider max apertures. The loss of pixels is less relevant with modern high res sensors and sometimes a cropped interpolated prime image can be sharper than a straight zoom image. Of course a lot of these differences disappear if buying very expensive and heavy zooms

In reply to Skyfall:
Full frame equivalent, I'm summoning up the courage to make the plunge to full frame

Dream system
Nikon D850
Nikon 16-34 F4
24-70 f2.8
70-200
85mm 1.4
Lee filter system

My current walk about is a Olympus mod em 5 with a Panasonic 15mm (30mm equivalent) awesome lens and the discipline of using a prime is good, ironically it's evil ant to an iPhone ????