Posts Tagged ‘Zoom Lenses’

Interchangeable Lens Cameras are often sold in kits containing a basic zoom lens. Because these lenses come with the camera as part of a kit, they are often referred to as 'kit lenses'.

The kit lens depends on the camera, but it is practically always a zoom. Often it is something like an 18-55mm for an APS-C camera, 24-100mm for a full frame camera, or 14-24mm for a m4/3 camera. These are all roughly equivalent.

The kit lens lets you go from wide-angle to short telephoto and everything in between. It's a good all-round general purpose lens.

Often you may read disparaging remarks about kit lenses. For sure, they're not the sharpest lenses around, and they don't have fast apertures for easily creating smooth and creamy out of focus backgrounds. But they're surprisingly useful and can give great results when you play to their strengths.

If you have an interchangeable lens camera and you're interested in capturing photos that are more than simple snapshots, then there will likely come a time when you want to purchase a new lens for your camera. Although some photographers seem to always be obsessed with the latest and greatest camera bodies, in most cases a new lens will do much more for your photography than a camera body will.

The problem can come in choosing a lens - there are so many different lenses to choose from. Different focal lengths, zooms, and fixed focal length lenses, with and without image stabilization, and at many different price points. In this article I'll look at the different features you should consider when looking at a lens, and how to decide which lens is best for you.

Being a photographer is a constant learning experience. But we all have to start somewhere. In this article I want to share seven tips aimed particularly at relatively new photographers, but they should also act as good reminders even if you've been photographing a long time.

In this article I want to look at why using a different lens to the one that came with your camera might be a good idea. I'm not going to go into details about the quality of the lens - most 'kit' lenses sold with cameras today are perfectly fine.

Rather, I want to look at how restricting yourself to using a lens or focal length you don't normally use much can help you hone your photographic technique.

Most compact cameras come fitted with built-in zoom lenses, and interchangeable lens cameras often come with a zoom lens bundled as part of the package. So what are the advantages of zoom lenses, and are there any potential problems to look out for?

Motion zoom can be created by zooming in or out while taking a photo with a slow shutter speed. Using this technique you can take a mundane subject, and change it into a surreal and abstract photo.

You can start at your lens' widest focal length and then zoom in while taking the photo, or start at the longest focal length and then zoom out, each has a slightly different effect. You can try zooming in and out during one exposure for a combined effect as well.

Zoomblur by Andreas Levers on flickr (licensed CC-BY)