Consider New Lenses?

The major things you need to consider when buying a lens fall into four categories:

• The optical quality of the lens: The better the lens, the better it can capture - resolve - fine details. In most cases, the optical quality of digital camera lenses go hand in hand with the price of the camera and the resolution of the sensor. At higher price levels, camera lenses have better-quality optics, which are necessary to keep up with the detail capturing capabilities of higher megapixel image sensors.
  
  
• The speed of the lens: A lens' speed is determined by the maximum amount of light the lens is capable of transmitting—the largest f-stop value. Some camera lenses can capture larger amounts of light than others, generally because they have a greater diameter that can transmit more light. Think of a 1-inch-diameter pipe and a 2-inch-diameter pipe and visualize how much more water (or light) the wider pipe can conduct.
  
  Lens speed, in part, controls how low of a light level you can take pictures in and separates lenses into two categories - fast and slow. Fast camera lenses allow photographers to shoot at higher shutter speeds in low-light conditions. If you take many pictures in dim light, you will want a faster lens. For example, camera lenses with maximum f-stop values between 1.0 and 2.8 are considered fast
  
  
• The focusing range of the lens: The minimum focus distance of a lens determines how close you can get to a subject. If too close, the image will be blurry. Some camera lenses can focus closer than others. The ability to get up-close and personal with your subject can be very important in some types of photography.
  
  
• The magnification range of the lens: The zoom range determines how much or how little of a particular subject you can include in an image from a particular shooting distance. You might be able to take your basic image and double it in size (a 2:1 zoom ratio), triple it (a 3:1 zoom), or magnify it 12X or more (a 12:1 zoom). As you might expect, the ability to zoom enhances your creative options significantly. At the widest settings (wide-angle settings), you can take in broad sweeps of landscape, whereas in the narrowest view (telephoto), you can reach out and bring a distant object much closer.
  

 

Deciding What Lens to Use When

A normal (or "standard") lens for a 35mm camera usually refers to a fixed focal length lens of 50mm or a zoom lens zoomed in a little from its widest angle. The reason it is considered a standard lens is because a 50 mm lens is accepted as making the images of objects at different distances in a scene appear in about the same proportions as seen in real life.

Using a longer focal length lens (telephoto), everything appears closer than it actually is.
With a shorter focal length lens (wide-angle), everything looks farther away.
A normal-focal-length (50mm) lens is not necessarily the one photographers normally use. Deciding what camera lenses to use comes down to the types of objects in your photographs and the amount of time you have to shoot them.

• Shooting in low lighting conditions: The maximum apertures of f/3.5 to f/4.5 in the basic camera lenses are much too "slow" to be useful in low light levels. When shooting in such conditions, you will be looking to use zoom lenses with maximum aperture of f/2.8 or selecting a fixed focal length lens with an f/1.4 to f/2.0. You can invest in 28mm, 30mm, 35mm, 50mm, or 85mm f/1.4 lenses that can shoot under very dark conditions.
  
  
• Shooting sharper images: If you are after sharper images, you can often get better results with a special lens that was designed to produce sharper images. You might look into buy a close-up lens that is optimized for macro photography and produces especially sharp images at distances of a few inches or so.
  
  
• Shooting wider angle scenes: Using a wide-angle lens lets you take in a broader field of view, which can be useful when there is not enough room to move farther away from your subject.
  
  
• Shooting farther away: A telephoto lens lets you bring distant objects that much closer to your camera and makes it especially useful when you cannot get close to your subject.
  
  
• Shooting closer: An interchangeable lens you buy may be able to focus on subjects a lot closer to the lens, giving you valuable close-up or macro capabilities.