What To Look For When Purchasing Camera Lenses

Photography can be an extremely fun and rewarding hobby, but camera lenses can often be quite expensive. This is especially true of highly specialized lenses. Therefore, knowing what your choices are before you go shopping can help you narrow down the particular lens that you need and can prevent you from accidentally duplicating the ones that you already own.

You may have heard several terms with regards to cameras. A camera can be film based, where light exposes film captures the image in this way, and digital where the light triggers a digital sensor and saves the image to a memory chip or card in the camera. There are also point and shoot cameras which come with a built in lens and single lens reflex (SLR) cameras which have interchangeable lenses. Professionals choose SLR cameras because they can be customized to the subject and light conditions with the change of a lens.

If you will be doing a lot of shooting you will want to invest in specialized lenses over time. However, your average shooter requires just one lens to get them started. For regular shooting conditions, you want one with a focal length of between 35 and 70 mm.

This is because it has a long enough focal length that you do not get any distortion. It is also short enough that you can shoot in different lighting conditions with less chance that your pictures will be blurry. The longer that an image must be exposed, there is a higher chance that your images will be blurred from the natural movement of your hands. Since this is not what you want for your pictures, you should pick the right focal length for your needs.

The next step that many shutterbugs take is to purchase a lens which allows them to shoot animals, birds or sports. The same principals apply to any of these subject matters. You need speed because athletes and animals tend to move faster than you may believe. You also need the ability to get your shot from a fairly long distance away. A good choice is a lens which has focal lengths of between 150 and 300 mm.

You will find that because the focal length is so long, the picture you get is going to be limited to what you were pointing the camera at and not much else. Think of looking through your camera like looking through a cardboard tube. The shorter the tube, the more you can see through the end. The longer the tube, the more focused the image is.

For a wider angle of picture, you may want shorter focal lengths. This are also known as wide angle. You can get really neat effects with a fish eye, which tends to distort the image quite a bit. Fish eyes have a very distinctive look that most experienced photographers can recognize immediately.

Finding the right camera lenses is as much a matter of personal preference as it is the type of shooting you are doing. As time goes on, you will find that your collection will expand and you will love trying new and different focal lengths and shutter speeds in your pictures. Good shooting!

For the beginning photographer with a point and shoot camera, the choice of camera lenses is frequently not an issue. This is because the average digital or film camera does not allow the photographer to change the camera lense.

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