Stone Field Reverie

Lens is the most important part of a camera. Without a lens a camera is nothing and meaningless. The quality of the picture taken with a camera is determined by the quality of the lens. So if you fail to pick up a good quality lens your camera will be of no use.

Usually, the ability of a lens to capture good quality pictures is determined by a factor “focal length”. There are basically three types of lenses, wide angle, normal and telephoto. Wide angle lenses have a wide angle view and focal length between 20mm to 55mm and a small magnification. Normal lenses have focal length of about 50mm. A telephoto lens will have a focal length between 105mm and 300mm and has a narrow angle view.

Lenses with fixed focal length are cheaper and simpler to use. However you cannot expect great quality pictures with these lenses. And you might have to move a lot in order to get the right shot. Going for a retractable zoom lens is a decent option. In this case the lens protrudes forward when the camera is turned on and is retracted when the camera is turned off. Such lens is nicely protected. However, manual controls are not much available and the lens does not accept filters or converters or flash rings.

On the other hand fixed zoom lenses don’t retract and are fixed to the camera. As a result, the camera can be started faster (since you don’t have to wait until the lens extends). The main advantage of fixed zoom lenses is that they allow the usage of filters, lens converters and flash units unlike retractable zoom lenses.

Lens speed is another important factor which is usually measured in f-stops. The lesser the lens speed, the better and usually expensive. And, the lesser the lens speed the larger will be the “Aperture” which relates to the amount of light passing through the lens towards the sensors that process the image. If a lens allows you to open a wider aperture then it usually has a faster shutter speed.

Focusing distance is something that needs to be noted as well. It is the minimum distance between the lens and the subject in order to focus the subject.

If the Image stabilization (IS according to Canon and VR, Vibration Reduction according to Nikon) feature of a lens is good then certain hand held shots can be taken without the shake and the blurry effect even with poor lighting. IS counteracts with the shake effect.

Going for a camera with interchangeable lenses is usually recommended for serious amateurs since they have nice options to control views and quality of the pictures. Although it may seem that buying many lenses is expensive, it is indeed a money saver, because you don’t have to buy a new camera for each feature. You can simply replace the lens depending upon the quality or difficulty of the shot you require.

About the Author

Make sure that you learn about camera lenses before going to buy one. If you want to buy camera lenses and good quality cameras visit Your Camera World.

[amazon_enhanced asin="B00007E7JU" /]

Article source: http://goarticles.com/article/How-To-Buy-A-Good-Camera-Lens/5930552/