So a while back I asked the masses about lens choice for street photography. Long story short, I decided to take the advice of shooting at one focal length on my kit 18-55mm, and seeing if it felt right.
Well, I did, and the 18mm focal length feels perfect.
Now, the hard part: What lens do I look for given I'm using a 1.6x crop sensor? An 18mm lens would get me a 28.8mm effective focal length, but alas, there are no 28.8mm lenses lol
Any advice? I'm trying not to spend a boatload here.
I read some of the comments here and they seem to have their thought out points and I'll just throw my peanuts into the gallery of comments.
If you like 18mm or so on your camera then realize it sits still in the realm of wide angle. You should learn more about wide angle lenses and their advantages and disadvantages.
I was very active in photography during the days of film. Wide angles were almost never used wide open and usually stopped down at least 2-3 stops to get to that top level of sharpness, depth of filed, limited/reduce aberrations etc. Where a fast wide angle comes in handy these days is the ability to use the auto focus. On many cameras today, a fast lens suffers less issues in focusing in lower light than a slower lens. This is perhaps the only reason unless you are doing some "action" type of photo work.
In the past, I have used on full 35mm 24mm, 28mm and 35mm for wide. I found the 24mm and the 35mm to have the best use for street/journalistic use AND a 85 to 90mm length as well. 24mm has a perspective that once corrected allowed for easy crop and a pleasing look while 35mm used properly seems to capture just slightly more than our own eyes see but have similar perspective. Though the 50mm is considered a standard, it is in reality slightly narrower than our own field of view and thus has a pleasing perspective. Of the latter, that is where the 85 or 90 comes in as it fully exploits this perspective that is more flattened and also allows one to be slightly further back.
I tell you all of this because sometimes it is a real combination of hands on and understanding field of view (not to be confused with depth of field) as well as finding the best combination of f-stop/t-stop and shutter speed. You may want to see some of the lens tests shown on various sights and see the various outcomes of the tests - barrel distortion, light fall off, resolving power (and at what f-stop, again usually 2-3 stops from open wide) etc. This may be more helpful than worrying about the name brand.
If you had the time and could rent, you may find it helpful to rent a lens or two and see how you fair with them and the results. As well, cameras such as the fixed lens Fuji X series (akin to a Leica range finder) and also Sigma's fixed lens camera with the foveon (sp) sensor would be a very usable street style camera.
Last thought - I mentioned lens perspective and one of the biggest challenges want_to_be street photographers is understanding that if they are tall, they are often tilting slightly down on subjects. An ideal perspective to test out is to shoot with the camera about chest high (meaning either squat down or have a camera with a fold out LCD back and look down at it with the camera about chest height). Enjoy!
