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Lens selection

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Five tips to help you choose a new camera lens. Your camera lens has much to do with how you capture the world.

Five tips to help you choose a new camera lens

So when it’s time to add a new optic to your kit, how do you decide which one? You have many things to think about: sharpness, distortion, durability, focusing speed, and cost, just to name a few. All of those factors are important. But before you get to the technical aspects, here are five considerations that might help you narrow down the list of candidates. Perspective Stand at the corner of the busiest street in your city, and shoot ten frames with a 9mm, 24mm, 50mm, 200mm, and 500mm lens.

At 9mm, you’ll capture asphalt, people, cars, buildings, and sky. The point is, visual perspective is an important part of storytelling. Maximum aperture An all-purpose zoom lens that’s typically bundled with a DSLR is good at providing a variety of perspectives from wide angle to mild telephoto. What does that mean? The second major impact is how you can manage the background of the composition. Size and weight Stabilization. Camera Lens Quality: MTF, Resolution & Contrast.

Lens quality is more important now than ever, due to the ever-increasing number of megapixels found in today's digital cameras.

Camera Lens Quality: MTF, Resolution & Contrast

Frequently, the resolution of your digital photos is actually limited by the camera's lens — and not by the resolution of the camera itself. However, deciphering MTF charts and comparing the resolution of different lenses can be a science unto itself. This tutorial gives an overview of the fundamental concepts and terms used for assessing lens quality.

At the very least, hopefully it will cause you to think twice about what's important when purchasing your next digital camera or lens. Everyone is likely to be familiar with the concept of image resolution, but unfortunately, too much emphasis is often placed on this single metric. To understand this, let's take a look at what happens to an image when it passes through a camera lens and is recorded at the camera's sensor. Tamron DSLR Lenses; Choosing a lens for your Digital SLR, Tamron USA, Inc. In the not-too-distant past, digital SLRs (DSLRs) were expensive professional tools selling for $5000 and up.

Tamron DSLR Lenses; Choosing a lens for your Digital SLR, Tamron USA, Inc.

About 5 years ago, even the so called “prosumer” 6-megapixel DSLRs purchased by early adopters and serious enthusiasts were selling at prices ranging from $1,500 to $2000, putting them out of the range of most average consumers. Today the situation is vastly different. The DSLR is now firmly established as a mass-market item with broad appeal. Most entry-level models are priced at under $1,000, and a few have street prices of around $600. No wonder industry gurus are predicting that DSLR sales will continue to increase in 2011 despite the challenging economy. One of the main attractions of a digital single-lens reflex (DSLR) camera is, of course, the ability to use interchangeable lenses, but which lenses should you choose from the hundreds, if not thousands, of lenses on the market? Most people who buy a new DSLR tend to get it with the standard “normal zoom” lens.

Wide Zooms. Tutorial: Lens Choice. In this article I would like to share my knowledge and thoughts about lens in consideration of focal length and how it affects the photographs.

Tutorial: Lens Choice

Here you will get an idea how to improve your photograph by using different focal length. Focal Length & Angle These two terms: Focal Length and Angle of view are very tightly related, and even you probably very well aware about a focal length that is used to mark the lens, i.e. something like 28-105mm f3.5-5.6 for zoom and 50mm f1.4 for lens with fixed focal length. But if you look for specification of the lens you have, among the parameters you will see the degree of the angle. Angles of View On the diagram above you may see the correlation between the focal length (the distance from the focal plane/point of focus to the lens) and the angle of view. There is another element, which affects the angle - the format of the camera.

. ~ Top ~ Perspective Further in the article I will often use the term "perspective", so I'd better explain its meaning. ).