The 28 mm was already decided

I arrived in Taipei with the 28 mm on the camera and the 35 mm at the bottom of the bag. That was not a decision I made in Taiwan. It had been made somewhere between Saigon and Hanoi. By the time I landed in Taipei, there was nothing left to choose. The lens was on the camera. The camera went around my neck. And then I just walked.

That is an underrated thing. Most photographers, myself included, tend to arrive somewhere new with a low-level hum of gear decisions running in the background. Which lens for this light? Should I switch? Would the other focal length suit this street better? That hum had gone quiet by Taipei. The 28 was simply the way the world looked through a camera. Taipei, its dense night markets, its narrow alleys in Wanhua and Datong, the warm chaos of Shilin, all of it came in through that same frame. And because the frame was fixed, I could stop thinking about it entirely.

What happens when the lens disappears

There is a shift that happens when you use a focal length long enough. You stop managing it. You already know how close to stand, how much will fit, where the edges will fall. In Taipei, I had reached that point without quite noticing. The technical side of things had moved into the background, where it belongs. I was not thinking about field of view. I was thinking about light, timing, and where to put myself.

That freed up something. Walking through Taipei, I found myself noticing things more cleanly. All the small moments, easy to miss if part of your attention is still on the gear. But when the camera becomes an extension of how you see rather than a piece of equipment you are operating, your attention goes fully outward.

The real lesson from three weeks and two lenses

In the Vietnam post I mentioned that I brought two lenses and only used one. The Taipei leg confirmed something deeper than that. It was not just that one lens was enough. The act of committing to it changed how I worked. Constraints are not limitations. They are the thing that gets you out of your own way. Once the choice of focal length was off the table, a whole category of mental noise disappeared with it.

Back in Oslo, something odd happened. I picked up the camera the first morning home and, without thinking, reached for the 35 mm. And it felt right. It still does. I shoot Oslo on 35, and I always have. But Thailand, Vietnam, and Taiwan were all shot on 28 mm, and I think I now understand why. The 28 forces you to get closer and take in more. Maybe that is exactly what you need when a place is unfamiliar: a wider frame, a more open posture, a willingness to let the strange come at you. The 35 is the focal length of a city I already know, already love, already have a way of seeing. The 28 might be what happens when you do not yet know where to look, and that turns out to be its own kind of advantage.

Here are the images I shot in Taipei: