subject: Choosing The Best Camera Lenses [print this page] Camera lenses can be considered and integral part of the digital single-lens reflex cameras or DSLR. The lenses used are optical lenses wherein it is made to exactly fit into the camera body to help produce a high quality image according to the photographers own liking. Understanding about how lenses work can be too difficult and too technical but in simple words, lenses are composed of lens elements and these elements help in directing the ray of light towards the camera to produce an image that is as accurate as what is seen in real life.
When buying a DSLR kit, it comes with a body and the lens. These bodies have the most basic lens so it can shoot wide angle photography, close-up, etc. However, as the photography skills evolve, kits should be upgraded along with the camera lenses to obtain the highest quality picture possible when taking a shot. Most of the time, camera lenses are expressed in mm or the lens focal length and here are some of the usual lenses used and what type of photography it is often used.
a.Less than 21 mm or the extreme wide angle is ideal for architecture photography.
b.21 to 35 mm is ideal for landscape and it is often called as wide angle lens.
c.35 to 70 which is the normal lens used for street photography and documentary
d.10 to 135mm is the medium telephoto where it is ideal for portrait pictures
e.135-300 +mm are used in sports and wildlife photography.
But more than the focal length, there are other factors to be considered when buying camera lenses. It includes the F-stops, macro, zooms, prime lenses and more.
The F Stops
This is referred to as the diameter of the aperture of the lens. To understand the F-stops, the lower the number, the wider the aperture is. The F-stop and the aperture are inversely proportional which means the lower the number, the brighter the picture can get. When looking at the lens, there are numbers in the side and the lowest f-stop means that it is the widest aperture the picture the lens can get.
The Zoom
Camera lenses help the photographer zoom in or out to take decent pictures. The beauty with many zoom lenses today is that it has different configurations wherein it can overlap with other lens categories so it can cover different focal lengths from 10mm to 24mm or some telephoto zooms where it can cover from 50mm to 200 focal lengths easily.
Macro
There is a thing called as macro photography where it is able to take micro pictures like ants, flowers, miniature objects, etc. it is like a microscope only that it captures high image pictures. Although ordinary lenses can are capable of taking macro shots, it is still best to buy macro lenses because it can give sharp and crisp photos of the miniature subject yet it can still produce a picture that is like life size because of its ability to zoom in.
