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Lenses

The best new glass for your D-SLR

This Article Features Photo Zoom

Ask most pros which they’d rather have: an entry-level camera with a top-of-the-line lens or a rudimentary lens on a top-of-the-line camera. They’ll choose the top-notch glass every time. It’s not that cameras and sensors aren’t important, but a really great lens is invaluable. The lens is what delivers your subject, framing the world so you can put it in perspective.

Camera buyers often concentrate only on the camera, accepting whatever lens may happen to come with it. Astute photographers, though, quickly upgrade their lenses—and they’re quick to see results, too. Working with the right lens for your needs doesn’t necessarily mean you have to buy the most expensive glass you can find, only that you understand the many different features of lenses, the benefits they bring and what makes each lens unique.

FOCAL LENGTH
Lenses are wide, normal or telephoto. A wide-angle lens usually measures less than 40mm in 35mm-equivalent terms. Normal lenses range from 40mm to 60mm or so, and telephoto lenses range from 70mm all the way up to 1000mm and beyond (although most common teles top out in the 300mm range).

Benefit: A wide lens is great for spreading out a scene—for instance, making a cramped interior look more spacious—and for getting lots of information into the frame to provide context. Normal lenses provide a distortion-free view, roughly the same as the human eye. Telephoto lenses are ideal for compressing scenes, covering a long distance in a narrow angle of view that brings far-away subjects close up.

PRIME VS. ZOOM
A prime lens has a fixed focal length: 20mm, 50mm, 100mm and so on. A zoom lens can be adjusted to any focal length within its range—say, 70-200mm and everything in between.

Benefit: Prime lenses often are lighter, faster and more compact than zooms, but to change focal length, you have to change lenses. Zoom lenses actually can be more convenient because a single zoom lens may do the job of multiple primes.

MACRO AND FISHEYE
A macro or micro lens is able to focus at very close distances. A fisheye lens has an extremely short focal length (such as 8mm or 10mm) and an extremely wide angle of view (beyond 100 degrees and often up to 180).

Benefit: Focusing on very small, very close objects makes it possible to achieve tremendous magnification, up to and beyond the 1:1 life-sized ratio considered to be the true measure of a macro lens. With a fisheye, the ultrawide options include full-frame lenses that cover a traditional 4x6 image or circular fisheyes that create a round image in the center of the frame—both making it possible to take in a huge “full-sky” field of view.

SPEED
The term “speed” doesn’t reference how fast a lens focuses, but rather how efficiently it can get light through the lens and into the camera. A faster lens has a wider maximum aperture (ƒ/2) than a slower lens (ƒ/5.6). Some zoom lenses don’t have fixed maximum apertures; rather, they’ll adjust from a larger maximum aperture at the wider end of the focal length (ƒ/3.5) to a smaller maximum aperture at the telephoto end (ƒ/5.6).

Benefit: A faster lens’ wider aperture makes it possible to use faster shutter speeds, making these lenses versatile and ideal choices in dim lighting. Wider apertures also let you minimize depth of field for soft backgrounds. Variable maximum apertures may sacrifice speed, but they often make zoom lenses smaller, lighter and less expensive.

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