How To Select A Canon Lens
June 18, 2010 Leave a Comment
If you are thinking “wait a minute, why do I need to buy a Canon lens? Why does not my own camera come with a lens isn’t that more cost effective? ” Well, the whole reason for buying a digital camera with interchangeable lenses is that you can buy and attach whatever lens you need for your photography jobs. A Canon lens is very highly recommended by most photographers (you can check their reviews online).
Before you Choose your Canon lens, you might need to consider the following:
1) What exactly do you want to Photograph with your Canon lens?
It is very important to know what you would be photographing; this will assist you make a decision when choosing a lens or lenses for your digital camera. Do you want shoot flora and fauna ? Portraits? Sports? Landscapes ? etc. It is very important you ask yourself this question.
2) How much do you Plan to spend on a Canon lens?
This simply depends on your finances; if you can afford it, you can spend a lot of money on acquiring lenses. So you must determine how much you are willing to part with, because this is very important when it comes to selecting a Canon lens.
3) Is Optical Quality Important to You? If So, Which Aspect of It is Important to You?
Most photographers whether professional or amateur prefer sharpness and contrast (obviously), but a lot of people forget about distortion. Most customer zooms are known to have a lot of distortion which makes them very unsuitable for shooting architecture. Unlike the more expensive canon lens, customer zooms are also known to be more vulnerable to what is known as “flare”- this is lowering contrast or which results in bright spots on the photograph if a very bright light is in or close to the frame.
General Categories of Canon lenses
a) Consumer lenses – Category 1 Lenses
If you are looking to buy a very cheap Canon lens, then you can opt for this category of lenses. However, there are known to have low-quality, they are slow lenses with plastic mounts and no distance scales! These lenses are constructed using plastic; this is what actually makes it very recognizable. They can also be recognized by their straight and parallel sided lens barrels.
b) Midrange Zooms – Category 2 Lenses
This category of the Canon lens is a little bit better because they have improved optics and a studier built features. Unlike the customer lenses, these lenses come with metal mounts and distance scales. Although they are better than the customer lenses, they still do not have optical clarity of the professional lenses used by professional photographers. This Canon lens is better designed (fairly elegantly), and these lenses come with slightly rounded and tapered lens barrels, they are also easy to grip because they have ribbed rubber zoom rings.
c) Affordable Primes – Category 3 Lenses
You can get a Canon lens known as prime (they are non zoom) lenses. The Canon manufacturing company have sold a rather large number of prime lenses, they have acceptable optics and averages build quality (although they usually come with noisy motor drives, distance scales and metal mounts). Although this canon lens is very reasonable priced (well it should be, the construction is not so remarkable) it can provide a photographer with a considerably good photographic result. This lens also tends to look a wee bit old fashioned because Canon doesn’t see any reason why they should be updated.
d) Good Primes – Category 4 Lenses
Now, this is the Canon lens that offer top notch optics and also provide a decent build quality. Great lenses such as the 85mm 1.8 and the 100mm 2.8 macro fit perfectly into this category of lenses. Most of these lenses have ultrasonic motors and they resemble the category 2 lenses (midrange zooms) because they have slightly rounded and tapered lens barrels too.
e) Specialized Lenses – Category 5 Lenses
This is one Canon lens that can be used for unusual applications. Canon just makes very few of these lenses, they are quite expensive to purchase.
Now you know what kind of Canon lens to use for your photographic work. If you cannot afford the type of lens you require for your photo work, you don’t have to Canon lens, you can simply rent-a- lens.
You would enjoy reading Canon Digital SLR.
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