Which lens should you buy?
Author: bjorn.fagerholm | Filed under: All, Photo tips & tricks
I thought I would write a little post about buying lenses.
I’m actually not going to write down which lens you should buy, more what might be good to know when choosing your lenses.
When I bought my first DSLR camera a Canon 300D I got a standard kit lens with it, the Canon 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6.
I thought it was great, it was such a big improvement from my little point and shoot cameras that I had own before that.
After about a year later I wanted to buy another lens and then I stumbled in to the world of lenses, everyone said that I should buy this and that because it’s an AF f/2.8 lens bla bla… I didn’t understand anything they were saying, can’t I just buy a lens that I can shoot better pictures with?
So if anyone is in that position now that I was in then, this might help you… at least I hope it will.
When you are choosing your lenses there are 3 main questions that you need to ask yourself.
A. What kind of photos do you want to shoot?
B. Are you using a full frame sensor or crop sensor sensor?
C. If you are using a crop sensor sensor camera, are you thinking about upgrading
someday?
D. If you don’t know what full frame sensor or a crop sensor is… no problem, I will tell you shortly.
Let’s actually start with question B.
I won’t go technical here, but a full frame sensor has a sensor which is the same size as the 35mm film frame has. A crop sensor will crop an X amount of your photos off, depending on which camera you are using. For example Nikon, Pentax, Sony and samsung has a crop factor of 1.5, canon 1.6, Sigma 1.7.
This sounds difficult but it actually isn’t that complicated.
For example, if you put a 10mm lens on a Canon crop sensor camera, you won’t actually see as wide as 10mm, you will see 10mm x 1.6 = 16mm.
If you put a 10mm lens on a Nikon you will have 10mm x 1.5 = 15mm.
But if you put a 10mm on a full frame sensor which means it doesn’t have a crop factor it will still be a 10mm lens.
Here are a few camera that are full frame sensors:
Canon EOS-1Ds
Canon EOS-1Ds Mark II
Canon EOS 5D
Canon EOS 5D Mark II
Canon EOS 1Ds Mark III
Nikon D3
Nikon D700
Nikon D3X
Sony α 900
If you don’t have any of those you probably have crop sensor.
So why did you really need to know all that?
Let’s now jump to Question A.
Well if you want to shoot landscapes for example you would want a pretty wide angle lens.
Let´s say for example you want to buy a 10-20mm lens for shooting landscapes.
Well if you buy it for a Canon crop factor sensor camera then what you really are buying is a 16-32mm lens. Because 10mm x 1.6 = 16mm and 20mm x 1.6 = 32mm.
So if you have a full frame sensor camera you should probably buy the canon 16-35mm lens instead.
Here are some example of lenses:
10-30mm for landscapes.
30-70mm for people and portraits
70-200mm for zooming in on things, like sports or portraits
200-500mm for bird and wildlife photographs.
Question C.
There are different lenses for Full frame sensor cameras and crop sensor cameras.
All the different lens brands has different names for theses lenses.
For example canon lenses are called either Canon EF or Canon EF-S.
Remember this, ALL EF and EF-S lenses work on a crop factor sensor cameras, BUT ONLY EF lenses work on full frame sensors!
Which means, if you buy an EF-S lens and then a few years later you buy a full frame sensor camera you WILL NOT be able to use that lens on that camera.
But if you buy an EF lens, it will work on both the crop sensor cameras and the full frame sensor cameras!
This works the same on all the camera brands.
So here is how you know the difference between different brands lenses:
Canon EF (Works on both full frame and crop sensor cameras)
Canon EF-S (Only work on crop sensor cameras)
Nikon FX (Works on both full frame and crop sensor cameras)
Nikon DX (Only work on crop sensor cameras)
Sigma DG (Works on both full frame and crop sensor cameras)
Sigma DC (Only work on crop sensor cameras)
Tokina AT-X (Works on both full frame and crop sensor cameras)
Tokina AT-XD (Only work on crop sensor cameras)
5 more things you might see on your lenses.
1. I said this before but remember when it says 55-150 f/3.5 - 5.5, it means that you can photograph at 55mm at f/3.5 and up and when you zoom in to 150mm you can only shoot at 5.5 and up.
2. IS and VR means that the lens has a stabilizer which will make it more easy to shoot by hand.
IS is for Canon, VR is for Nikon.
3. Canon L lenses, these are like the Porches of lenses, they are built better, they are sharper…
4. A prime lens (50mm instead of a zoom lens, 50-70mm) will usually be sharper than a zoom lens.
5. Try to only buy lenses with doesn’t have a f stop that changes when you zoom, they are usually not as good as the ones that has a specific F stop (a f/2.8 and not a 3.5-5.5) no matter how much you zoom.
So now that you have read this, then you should be able to understand how this works.
A great flash application done by: http://www.guraband.com
Well hopefully this will help at least someone, I wish I knew this when I bought my first lenses… :P
Here are some good links if you are looking for specific lenses:
Objektiivi.info Finnish site.
Dpreview Probably one of the biggest camera/lens review sites there is.













































