After my last post someone asked if they need bike-specific shoes.

These are shoes that have a mechanism to lock onto (specific kind of) pedals, so you become one with the bike, better exploiting your power.

Now while they are certainly nice, almost necessary, to cover long distances on road, or to tackle more demanding terrain at a fast pace mountain biking, their sole is stiff as a plank.

It is intentional, because this increases the power transfer from your feet to the pedals; but at the same time this feature makes the shoes exceedingly uncomfortable for walking around, even for short-ish distances.

So no, I would definitely advise you guys to avoid them for “photographic” use, because when you are scouting a place for pictures you will use the bike to go there, but then you will have / want to do a fair amount of walking as well to get the best angle, to explore places too rough to go to with the bike and so on.