Buying Guide For DSLR Lenses
Choosing the Right Lens for DSLR, the Buyer’s Guide
This is an absolute guide to read while you are looking to buy a lens for your Digital Single Reflex Camera (DSLR). A lens for you DSLR camera can cost you anywhere from as little as £40 to a bank breaking £10,000. So knowing about what lens you really need for your job does matter, as you may end up buying a lens that is costly in place of a lens that costs 10 times less then the one you bought but solves the same purpose for you. So figuring out your need really matters much, and in the forthcoming section you will find out how to figure out your exact need. For a start in this topic you need to answer some questions, and here goes the list:-
- Do you shoot indoors or outdoors?
- Do you take pictures of closer things or farther things?
- Do you take photos of fast moving objects (i.e. action, sports)?
- Do you want to take portraits or do weddings?
- Do you like hiking around to take pictures of wildlife and nature?
- Are you into macro photography?
- Do you take pictures of landscapes, interiors, and/or architecture?
- Do you prefer more compact, convenient lenses or more bulky, inconvenient lenses that will help you take “better” pictures?
Once you are done with answering your needs, you are advised to take a look in your pocket, I mean how much it allows you to spend or how much you are willing to spend, this really depends on your seriousness in this field and how many lenses you are planning to buy. A very broad division b/w the budgets can be based on your budget that could be:
Under £200: In this case there is not much of scope for a lens that will meet all your needs but still a solid 3rd party all-purpose lens will be your best bet. Hopefully, you won’t be in tricky situations like indoor sports, concerts or indoor venues where flash is prohibited.
Between £200-£400: This is again a very mediocre range where you can get better then a solid 3rd party all-purpose lens but will only be able to reach a top-grade 3rd party lens with money to spare for a 50mm prime (for low light situations). Don’t expect a “premium” first-party (Canon/Nikon) lens for such a sum, but always remember its always you to decide on how much and on what to spend.
Above £400: Since this division is pretty broad on the scale, you might expect a entry-level premium lenses. However, these may not work for tricky situations like indoor, low-light photography. For those situations, you will want to look at lenses with large apertures of at least f/2.8. You may also want to opt for a prime instead. Going up the scale can fetch you the best in class, but again don’t go by the price rather stick to your needs and concentrate on the lens that solves your purpose.
Buying two lenses is never advised in the Initial stages rather buy slowly and constantly evaluate what you need. You may end up changing your mind once you start shooting.
USEFUL TIP: What ever is your final decision, be sure to actually try them out in the store before buying! Make sure you’re comfortable with the build of the lens as well as its weight. And most importantly, make sure that its optical quality meets your expectations. Also bring a memory card and see how the shots come out at home. There’s no way you can evaluate image quality through the preview LCD, even a 3.5″ one.
So what determines the Price for a lens?
If this is your first purchase and you are going through the prices for the very first time, then you may be quite bewildered at the pricing scheme. It may be counter intuitive at first to see that the lenses with the widest ranges (the highest “optical zoom”) tend to be the cheapest while the ones with the most restrictive ranges tend to be the most expensive.
But once you come across how several key factors play into the final cost of a lens, you’ll understand why certain lenses can cost thousands while seemingly similar ones can cost only hundreds.
The two Governing Factors that decides the price tag on the lens are:
- Focal Length: The easier make a lens sports, cheapest it sells for. The ones with anything close to the 50mm mark are considered easy on the make. The farther you go(+ve or –ve) from the 50 mm mark, the costlier the lens will be. The 10 mm or the 500mm are much trickier to design as compared to the 50 mm one. You should also take into account the fact that most digital SLR’s use sensors whose area is smaller than that of 35mm film. This is where the crop factor originates and is why people commonly say to multiply a lenses focal length by 1.5x or 1.6x to get its true length.
- Aperture: How large the aperture is what acts as the deciding factor while deciding the price for a lens, the larger the aperture is (indicated by a small f-number), the more costly a lens is going to be. This is the factor that can divide a difference worth £1000 between two lenses with the same focal lengths. A point to be noticed is that the large apertures have huge, fat barrels while the small aperture lenses are skinny and compact.
The other minor features like build quality and the inclusion of ED (extra low dispersion) elements for reducing Chromatic Abberation playes important role in deciding the price of a lens.
Do you really need a big aperture? If yes then how Big?
A bigger aperture is good but that cost you a lot of extra money. But why do you need a bigger aperture anyways?
The answer could be any or some of the following reasons:-
Bigger apertures are most commonly used in situations where there’s poor lighting and you can not put your flash into use. In order to take a picture either the camera will need a bigger aperture or it will need to make up for its unavailability by a slower shutter speed that helps the camera to expose to the shot properly, another way of solving this problem is Using a larger ISO value but going too high may sometimes introduce unwanted noise into the picture. Handholding the shot in this situation would need a bigger aperture because a slower shutter speed will lead to camera shake and blurriness.
What aperture you really need?
An available-light indoor photography will require at least f/2.8 but f/2.0 or larger is recommended.
For indoor sports or action photography, f/2.0 and larger is virtually required, so you can get fast shutter speeds to freeze the action in addition to bumping up the ISO to 800 or 1600.
For working in decent light (i.e. outdoors) f/4 will do well. Also if you tend to work mostly outdoors in great lighting, f/5.6 and above will suffice. Bringing a monopod or a tripod to stabilize things can even get away with even smaller apertures.
Do you know the Extender?
An extender is a special kind of lens that fits itself between the main lens and your camera. It is basically used to increase the focal length of your lens by some set amount. For instance you have a 100 mm lens and two extenders that are marked as 1.4 x and 2.0 x then the focal length will be transformed into 140mm and 200mm respectively.
Using an extender to suit your requirement can be quite useful in extending the reach of your lenses at a relatively low cost while taking less space.