One Prime, One Mulled Wine: The Olympus Christmas Market Dare

Here is a challenge for the festive season. Take one compact Olympus prime, one camera body, and one UK Christmas market. No zoom. No second lens in the bag. No sneaking a 12-40mm into your coat pocket. The prime can be the M.Zuiko 17mm f/1.8, which gives you a 34mm-equivalent view, or the 25mm f/1.8, which sits at a classic 50mm-equivalent. Both are small enough to forget about and fast enough to handle the murk between fairy lights.

The market can be Birmingham's Frankfurt Christmas Market, Manchester's wooden huts, York's Shambles, Bath's Abbey Green, Edinburgh's East Princes Street Gardens, Cardiff's Winter Wonderland or Winchester's cathedral close. The location matters less than the commitment. The point is to spend a day with one focal length and see what happens.

The rules of the dare

One body. One prime. One battery, plus a spare in your pocket. Keep the lens on the camera from the first stall to the last. If you see a shot that needs a different lens, move your feet or let it go. That is the dare. It is not about punishment. It is about noticing how often you reach for a zoom because you are unsure where to stand.

The 17mm is the environmental choice. It gets the stall, the crowd and the lights in one frame. The 25mm is the detail hunter. It isolates hands around a mulled wine cup, a child's face under a woolly hat, the steam off a bratwurst. Pick one and stick with it. If you are feeling brave, pick the 25mm. It is less forgiving in tight crowds, but it forces cleaner compositions.

Scenes worth hunting

• The first sip. Catch the steam and the cupped hands around a mulled wine or hot chocolate. Shoot from slightly below the cup, with fairy lights behind.
• Wet cobbles. Use the reflections of stall lights in paving stones. Get low, focus on the reflection, let the crowd blur.
• Stallholder portraits. Ask first, then shoot wide open at f/1.8 or f/2. The lights behind them will turn into soft discs.
• Bauble frames. Shoot through hanging decorations, wreaths or a loop of fairy lights close to the lens. The foreground becomes a glowing frame.
• Children and dogs. Get down to their height. A 25mm at f/2.8 gives you enough context without turning them into a specimen.
• Food steam. Backlight the steam from a food stall and expose for the highlights. The market does the atmosphere for you.
• Carol singers. Look for silhouettes against a lit stall. Meter for the lights, not the faces, and let the singers go dark.
• The quiet edges. Step away from the main drag. Photograph a discarded ribbon, a stack of stollen boxes, a queue of people stamping their feet. The margins are often more interesting than the centre.

Composition tricks for crowds and fairy lights

Crowds are not the enemy. They are the texture. Use a slow-ish shutter, around 1/60sec to 1/80sec, to let people blur while the stalls stay sharp. Brace yourself, use IBIS and take a few frames. If you want clean singles, wait for a gap and shoot at 1/125sec or faster. Silent shutter is useful here. It keeps you discreet and avoids the clack that makes people turn round.

Fairy lights are easy to overdo. Do not try to include every bulb. Put one string close to the lens and let it become a wash of colour. Use a wide aperture and focus on the subject, not the lights. If the lights are blowing out, dial in minus exposure compensation and bring the subject back in raw. A 17mm can make the lights feel immersive. A 25mm can make them feel intimate. Both work, but they tell different stories.

Shoot through things. A gap between stalls. A window display. A wreath. A pretzel. The frame within a frame is your friend when the market is packed. Look for colour blocks: red ribbons, green garlands, gold lights. Keep the background simple by moving two steps to the left. Most crowd shots fail because the photographer stands still and hopes.

Be a decent human. Do not block a stall, do not stick a lens in a stranger's face, and do not photograph children without a word to the parent. A smile and a nod gets you further than a long lens ever will.

Settings that keep you in the moment

Start in aperture priority at f/1.8 for atmosphere, then stop to f/2.8 if you need more sharpness or context. Set auto ISO with a ceiling of 6400, because Christmas markets are darker than they look. Use a minimum shutter speed of 1/80sec for static scenes and 1/125sec for people. Enable face detection for portraits, but switch to single point for details. Shoot raw. The mix of tungsten, LED and fairy lights will confuse any white balance preset, and you will want the latitude later.

Do not chimp after every frame. The dare is about looking, not checking. Review when you stop for a drink. Keep the camera on and ready. The best market moments last about half a second.

The verdict: does one lens beat the zoom habit?

Mostly, yes. A single prime makes you work. It stops the lazy habit of standing in one spot and twisting the barrel until the frame fits. With a 17mm or 25mm you have to commit, move, crouch, wait and sometimes walk away. That is good for festive street photography. It also keeps your kit small, which matters when you are carrying mulled wine, a scarf and a bag of gingerbread.

But I will not pretend it is always better. A zoom is genuinely useful at a market when you cannot step back into a crowd or forward into a stall. The one-lens challenge is not a religion. It is a reset. Do it for a day, then go back to your zoom if you want. You will probably frame more deliberately for a while. And you will definitely notice more fairy lights.

If you try the dare, take the 25mm. It is the harder lens, and the harder lens teaches more. Then buy yourself a mulled wine and review the frames while they are still warm.