Best Mirrorless Camera for Street Photography
- What Is Street Photography?
- Best Mirrorless Camera for Street Photography
- Best Mirrorless Camera for Street Photography - Bargain Version
- Best Mirrorless Camera for Street Photography - High-End Version
- Inexpensive Accessories for Street Photography
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I’ll give you three different options so you can tailor the answer of the best camera for street photography to your specific situation, needs, and desires. We’ll look at the best choice for many people, a bargain option as an affordable street photography camera, and a high-end camera.
To understand just what you need as the best mirrorless camera for street photography, we’ll also review what street photography is, discuss some street photography ideas, review easy-to-master street photography techniques, and go over some inexpensive accessories for street photography.
Table of Contents
What Is Street Photography?
photo by Orbon Alija via iStock
My best answer to this question, especially as it relates to what may be the best mirrorless camera for street photography for you, is to point to some examples from the past.
Classic street photography artists such as Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Frank, and Helen Levitt, are all pioneers of this craft.
Street photography can be random, candid photography, hastily posed portraits on the fly, documentary photography, or any combination of those or somewhere in between any of these street photography ideas.
Many of the classic era of street photographers gravitated toward the smaller 35mm rangefinder cameras from Leica, Contax, Canon, and Nikon. A fast normal lens or slightly wide-angle lens was most often used. A 50mm f/1.4 or a 35mm f/2.0 was commonly the lens of choice.
A lot more could be said about street photography techniques and ideas, but I’m sure you get the picture. The current crop of mirrorless interchangeable lens cameras are closest to the style of those older cameras. So, now let's look at my three choices of the best mirrorless camera for street photography.
Best Mirrorless Camera for Street Photography
I will start with the MFT format Olympus OM-D E-M5 Mk III with 12-45mm Pro lens, which retails for a little under $1900.00. It has multiple features that make it a fantastic candidate as being the best mirrorless camera for street photography.
This camera has a 20MP MFT format sensor which provides outstanding image quality within a very compact camera body. MFT is one of what I consider the three formats best suited for serious photography. The other two are APS-C and Full Frame formats.
There is an in-body image stabilization function that gives up to 5 ½ stops of ability to handhold the camera in a wide range of exposure conditions. That helps make up for the lens being of modest maximum aperture, f/4.0, for allowing good image captures in street photography.
So, the photos you can get with this camera are going to be high quality, sharp, and full of exposure information when used in RAW file capture mode. That is a very desirable feature for any camera boasting to be the best mirrorless camera for street photography.
The camera body and this pro lens are weather sealed for extra protection from the elements, another feature that benefits our choice of best mirrorless camera for street photography.
This particular lens is well suited for a lot of street photography ideas since it has a range from wide-angle, through normal, up to a little bit of telephoto. There are many lenses from various manufacturers in the MFT mount, so this camera can do a lot for you besides being the best mirrorless camera for street photography.
It isn’t the perfect camera for everything - it doesn’t have a built-in flash or 4K video. But I find it hard to beat as my top choice for best mirrorless camera for street photography. Now let’s see what other options we have.
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Best Mirrorless Camera for Street Photography - Bargain Version
Sony Alpha a6000 with 16-50mm power zoom lens is my choice for the bargain version of the best mirrorless camera for street photography. It is an APS-C format camera with a 24.2MP sensor and retails for under $750.00.
Features of this camera which make it a bargain choice for best affordable street photography camera are its super-fast autofocusing, a huge array of lenses available, Full HD video, and a super-vivid tilting viewscreen for a lot of street photography ideas and street photography techniques.
Best Mirrorless Camera for Street Photography - High-End Version
Let’s go back to the camera brand which epitomized the classic era of street photography, the Leica rangefinder. Perhaps the closest to the spirit of the Leica III-G screw mount camera or Leica M3 camera with M-mount bayonet lenses is the 24MP Leica Typ 240 Full Frame format mirrorless rangefinder camera.
If the budget works for you, a Leica rangefinder camera with a relatively fast medium wide-angle lens such as the Leica Summicron-M 35mm f/2.0 is probably the best mirrorless camera for street photography that I could consider recommending.
The quality of all Leica products is nothing short of amazing, but you will pay for that privilege. This particular combo, for instance, will set you back around $9,300.00 or so to own this high-end version of the best mirrorless camera for street photography.
Inexpensive Accessories for Street Photography
After the camera and lens, a few choice accessories will round out our gear for the best mirrorless camera for street photography. Three accessories I will focus attention on are a portable camera mount, a comfortable strap, and a versatile bag.
For street photography, flash is seldom used, but we may need a little more capability for low light shooting than is offered by our lens aperture and the camera image stabilization functions. But, using a tripod isn’t likely to be our best solution.
The stability and portability of the OctoPad Camera Mount make it virtually indispensable for our street photography techniques and ideas.
OctoPad is a lightweight, compact, inexpensive, and ultra-steady camera mount that pairs perfectly with our best mirrorless camera for street photography choice. It has a weighted disk base with a non-slip pad underneath and a ball head on top.
You can carry this camera mount with you for all types of street photography techniques and it even can be placed on surfaces with an incline of up to 45 degrees. It really is about the best accessory for your new best mirrorless camera for street photography.
Other useful accessories to combine with the best mirrorless camera for street photography are a sling strap such as the BlackRapid RS-4 and a heavy-duty bag such as the Hex Ranger for camera and gear protection.
That’s my take on the best mirrorless camera for street photography and some very useful accessories. I’m curious what your choices would be?
