Pick a Lens for your Camera in ANY situation.

How to Pick a Lens for your Camera in ANY situation.

There is no BEST lens for your camera – only a BEST lens for you and for the situation you are shooting in! In this video, I explain what you need to look for in a lens so the first lens you buy is a good fit. Once you understand these else features you will be able to ALWAYS pick the best lens for any situation. That’s a skill many photographers never quite master.

In this video, I’m not going to give you a list of 3 lenses and promise they’ll make you a better photographer. What I can do is teach you about lenses. So you’ll know HOW to pick a lens for your camera in ANY situation. No matter what type of photographer you are – or want to become.

Highlights

– What type of photographer do you want to be?
– Why you need to understand angle of view before you buy a lens.
– How perspective distortion can ruin your portraits.
– How to save money on lenses

Like what you see? Register for one of my upcoming Cultural Photography workshops! You could be taking photos like this!

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Pick a Lens for your Camera – Video Transcript

My first lens was a 50 to 300 zoom lens. Or something similar. A lens that promised the world, but delivered very little.

And do you know why? Because a lens like that is like a swiss army knife. It’s a jack of all trades, but a master of none.

You see, photography is all about compromise. By choosing a zoom lens with such a wide focal range, I was compromising on other essential features. I just didn’t realize it at the time

Photographer Type

The first question you need to ask yourself is a The Queen’s Gambit online sa prevodom pretty obvious one in retrospect: “What will you be taking photos of?”.

Do you want to photograph landscapes or wildlife? Maybe you want to try your hand at street photography? Or portraiture? Pick the topic that matches your interest.

I’m primarily a portrait photographer, so for me, a typical situation involves taking photos where the dominant element in my photo will be a person.

And by dominant, I mean where that person will fill up a large part of my frame.

Focal Length

This idea of a model ‘filling the frame’ is actually a great place to start our lens selection process. That’s because the space elements occupy in a frame is determined by the focal length of your lens.

The focal length of a lens – that’s the number in mms you can find on The Sopranos online sa prevodom the front of the lens – dictates what is called angle of view. Angle of view is how much of the scene in front of the camera ends up in your frame. In your photo.

A 16mm lens, like the one currently on my camera, has a sweeping 100° angle of view. That’s why it’s called a wide-angle lens.

Wide-angle lenses are great for landscape photography, where you serije online might want to take in the entirety of a scene. Just like I’m doing here with this wide seascape composition.

A portrait is different though. I often want the focus to be on my model, not on their environment. A 50mm lens achieves this by taking us from a 100° angle of view to a 40° angle of view.

When you zoom with your feet you’re not changing the angle of view. Which means you’re not zooming. Because zooming IS changing the angle of view.

This is why understanding how your lens works is so important. I see a lot of photographers try and get the shot they want by just moving around. Nothing wrong with that, you can recompose that way. But once you understand angle of view you can much better control your end composition, because you know when your lens is a limiting factor.

But angle of view is not the only issue here. See how Dan looks different in my wide-angle shot.

This is because of a phenomenon called Perspective Distortion.

Perspective Distortion

Perspective distortion is the warping of elements in your frame. The warping is relative to what you see with your eyes. Because your eyes are lenses after all. And the angle of view of your eyes is about 45mm.

This is actually why most portrait photographers are drawn to that nifty 50mm lens. It just ‘feels’ right because it comes close recreating what we see with our eyes.

Distortion will start to occur as the focal length of your lens moves away, in either direction, from that ‘normal’ focal range.

Barrel distortion is what happens when you use a wide-angle lens with a lower focal length. As you can see from the grid, the grid lines are being pulled outwards. This kinda looks like you are pulling the middle of the face towards the camera and you get big cartoonish noes and eyes. Not a popular look!

Pin-cushion distortion is what you get with telephoto lenses. And it kinda looks like someone is pulling the model’s ears.

Aperture

Aperture is important to this conversation because it creates an optical phenomenon known as depth of field. Depth of field is the part of your scene where objects appear sharp in your image.

And depth of field is why portrait photographers love lenses with wide apertures. A wide aperture can be used to separate a subject from its surroundings, or from other subjects.

So what do I have against zoom lenses?

It boils down to this, unless you have a bulging wallet, a zoom lens will not have a wide enough max aperture to create the subject separation needed for a most portraiture work. Good luck picking a lens for your camera!