Telephoto Wide

Why Lenses Are So Important When Buying A New Camera

When people shop for a Digital SLR Camera, they often forget or skip the camera's important part: lenses. These Camera Lenses are the digital cameras "eye,". Lens determine how and what the camera will see, how it will see the subject and how good this view is passed onto the camera's sensor chip in recording. For me, camera lenses are as brushes of painters, medium strokes, broad strokes, small details brushes and all purpose brushes. There are a lot of things to learn with digital slr cameras lenses and the article will give a basic outline for understanding these. The next sections do explain basic types used in digital SLR lenses, the way they work, also how to choose them. Focal Length: In a digital SLR camera, this measures the distance from the lens and the sensor, as measured in millimeters. The lenses can be categorised in subgroups: wide angle, prime, macro, zoom lenses and telephoto. Thelens are rated with regard to speed or f-stop. One example is a 1.4F 80mm lens or a F2.0 50mm lens. We will explain later this part in the article. Prime Lenses: are lenses with fixed focal length: a 50mm 1.4f lens. In order to zoom using these lenses, one needs to use its feet and get farther away from or closer to the subject. Usually prime lenses are faster and sharper then the zoom lenses. For people on a budget, they can buy some good used older prime lenses at eBay or from the local camera shop. Macro Lenses: Are seen as detail brushes. These enable the photographer to get close and personal to the subject. Macro lenses are used in extreme close ups and on small objects usually like pennies, daisies, or food, but are not limited for these kind of subjects. Some examples include 100mm and 50mm macros. Also they are great in photos that are selective focus types. Wide-angle Lenses: These are seen as broad stroke brushes; Their short focal length is good because it has a visual effect described as "pushing" your subject away from photographer and to make it look smaller. There is one problem with these wide-angle lenses, and this is also known as convergence, which is a distortion which makes some vertical structures to appear as leaning towards the center of its frame. Examples include: 17MM, 28mm, 15mm or 24mm lenses. Normal Lenses: These ones try to copy how human eye is seeing and are also extremely versatile. They are all purpose brushes, somewhere in the range of wide angle and telephoto. Normal lenses: 65mm; 50mm, 35mm, also some consider the 80mm a normal. Telephoto Lenses: They have long focal lengths more than 100mm, and are called also telephoto lenses. Long focal length seem to bring your subject closer, and to increase the size of the subject in a frame. Zoom Lenses: They are special in the sense that can be versatile. Zoom lenses vary a lot in focal length and come in telephoto, wide angle, and also wide-angle to telephoto.
When you shop for a zoom lens check the rating for the f-stop. One example is f3.5-f5.6 24mm to 300mm lenses, which means the lowest f-stop for which you can photograph is at a 24mm range from the lenses and if you zoom at 200mm then the lowest you could go is at f5.6. When you buy a zoom lens please try to get one which is glass-made and which is the fastest that you could afford, and you wont regret the decision. If youunderstand what the different groups for lenses can do, this will help you to make a more informed decision regarding what kind of lens to buy.
About the Author

Alex is a writer about photography techniques for http://reshade.com . Reshade works in the field of online picture processing programs and offers a free online photo resizer web-tool. It's also possible to purchase a photo resizer application for Windows. Give it a try !