Choosing the Right Camera Lens: A Guide to Understanding Types and Uses of Photographic Lenses

Choosing a suitable lens for photography is important for professional photographers, but many people who have started or practiced the profession of photography for a long time may buy a camera lens without checking its usefulness or scope of use.

In this article, we will discuss together the best camera lenses and their use in photography. And this topic is very important because when we think about image quality in photography, there are two things that we should consider in general - the camera body and lens.

Prime lenses or Prime Lenses

These types of camera lenses are also known to be standard, and are ideal for general photography. The 50mm lens (on a full-frame camera), in particular, provides an angle of view that is very similar to what you see in front of you with the naked eye.

These primary lenses, as some call them, generally have a fixed focal length, meaning they cannot zoom or distance away. You need to adjust your position while framing. The plus, though, is that they usually allow the use of large apertures which is a great feature in low-light situations or when you're aiming for a great bokeh effect in portraiture.

These lenses are especially good for street photography. But it can also provide great results when shooting portraits or documentary photography.

Standard Kit Lenses

These lenses come with almost all cameras. Like the 18-55 lens, the 24-70 lens, or the 15-45 lens. So it's likely that if you have a DSLR, you already have a standard mid-range lens. These lenses usually have a fixed focal length of 50mm, although zoom lenses with focal lengths in the range between 35mm and 75mm are also considered standard. J

You can use it to capture medium shots, single or multiple shots, and in some cases, create shots, as they provide enough versatility to cover many different scenes. Standard lenses often have large apertures, which makes them very useful if you shoot videos often in lighting conditions that you cannot control.

Telephoto lenses

For example a 200-300mm lens on a full frame sensor (140-200mm on a Crop sensor or a clipping sensor).

Telephoto lenses close together closely to the subject. This makes it the preferred choice for wildlife photographers or athletes who cannot physically get close to their subjects.

The large focal length allows for a very shallow depth of field. In nature, this means photographing a bird (from a distance, without scaring it) with a completely blurry background.

However, telephoto lenses are really heavy. Without a tripod or at least a monopod, your photos would definitely be blurry due to the camera shake.

Medium Telephoto lenses

Case in point: a 70-200 mm lens on a full-frame sensor (50-150 mm on a crop sensor)

Lens in this focal length range are ideal for portrait photography.

The larger the focal length, the narrower the depth of field - this is another rule of photography that portrait masters like to exploit with this type of lens. The lens will allow your subject to appear against a blurry background completely which is what you really want when taking selfies.

These lenses are widely used by photographers, as an example is the white Canon 70-200 Tallah Photo lens. And it has the ability to zoom in close through the large zoom ring, and is suitable for sports photography and wildlife photography and things that need to be zoomed.

Super telephoto zoom lenses

Example: Lenses that are more than 300 mm on a full-frame sensor (more than 200 mm on a cropped sensor)

The super telephoto lenses get you further than a telephoto lens. With them, you can photograph sports or wildlife from greater distances.

Wide Angle Lenses

For example 16-35mm lens on full frame sensor (10-24mm on crop sensor)

Wide angle lenses, as their name suggests, allow us to have wider viewing angles and, therefore, fit a large scene in a single frame.

Apart from that, lenses with short focal length allow a greater depth of field. With them, we can easily produce a sharp image from foreground to background, which is what we usually want in landscape photography.

Wide-angle lenses are also ideal for photographing architecture and interior scenes where we want to fit as many objects as possible in one frame.

Fish-eye Ultra Wide Lenses

They are called fish-eye lenses because their raised glass resembles a fish-eye. These lenses often support a viewing angle of 180 degrees, allowing you to fit "the whole world" in one frame.

Fish-eye lenses provide many opportunities for compositional experiments and are often used in architectural and abstract photography.

Macro Lenses

Details, product shots, or any other subject that can be photographed at close range look better if captured with a macro lens. Macro lenses are used to photograph objects at very close range. Think close-ups of flowers, insects, jewelry, etc.

Tilt-shift specialist lenses

Tilt-shift lenses are designed to correct camera perspective when shooting up or down. The end result is an object that appears straight. The effect is achieved by the front lens element shifted to resist the camera's tilt.

Perspective correction works best in architectural photography. Tilt-and-shift lenses are often used to capture buildings that appear straight even when photographing at street level.