How to Choose the Right Lens for Your Camera

On behalf of Tvlesson.com, this is Steve Anthony, professional photographer. I work out
in New York and Miami.

Let's talk a little bit about various lens options for a photographer. If you have an SLR
camera, be it digital or film does matter. A lot of them use same interchange of lenses.
You will have a wide variety of lenses available to your for whatever purpose you happen
to need them.

But, the basic things you're going to want to know about our wide angle, normal at
telephoto. Now, white angle as you might guess, is a lens that allows you a very wide
field of vision. So, let's say you're taking a picture of a large group of people in a small
place, you want a nice wide lens which will enable you to encompass that entire group.

Now, when you don’t want to use a wide angle lens for it is a close up portrait of a
person’s face. Because of the nature of the lens, you have to get in very close to get that
portrait and is going to distort features such as noses, eyes, chins, whatever is closest to
the lenses are going to be slightly exaggerated. So, in that case you want -- you're going
to use at least a normal lens which -- well, let me talk a bit about of the focal length.

In photography, a white angle lens is anywhere from, say, 12 to 28 millimeters. That’s in
35 mm photography. The normal lens is good for taking pictures like head and shoulders
type of portrait. Again, with a normal lens, you don’t want to get too close because you’ll
have the same problem with distortion.

If you want to do a very close up portrait of somebody’s face, that’s where you want to
get into a telephoto lens. A short telephoto such as in the focal length of 85 to 105 mm is
good for close portrait photography. Now, you're getting the longer telephoto lens that’s
useful for nature photography. You can give nice close up shot of an animal from a
distance. You can't get too close obviously, you’ll scare them away so you get into like a
200 or 300 or even you can get as high as an 800 mm lens. That is almost like a telescope
where you can get a close up picture of something form very far away.

You’ll see a lot of photographers on the side lines of sporting events with these huge
lenses and that enables them to get a very close shot of the athletes in action and they can
stay at a comfortable distance. Now, in general, the lenses that I've just talked about -- the
wide angle and normal telephoto lens are of fixed focal lengths but there are lenses called
zoom lenses which enable you to vary the focal length from, say, 18 to 250 mm. In some
cases, the quality of the image is not as good but the versatility sometimes makes it
worthwhile to have just the one lens that will cover so many of your different needs.