Today you can get a fantastic image without knowing a single thing about photography but the reality is that if you take a few lessons, look up a few tips and have a better lens, you’ve got a greater chance than ever before of taking actual prize winning photos.

Over time and with a bit of education gleaned from online or offline, you can learn to select just the right lighting, and just the right focus and just the perfect lens.

For my money, nothing beats an SLR. They are handy, they save money and they are amazingly hardy to carry with you on an outdoor trek. You can come up with just about any lens that you like and sometimes more than you could find for the 35mm that you used with film.

The best way to get the kind of shots that you want will be to use some different caera lenses. If you don’t take the time to learn anything else at all then you should take the time to study a bit more about lenses, what they can do for you and how to use them.

Every photographer, beginner or professional should take the time to visit a good camera lens site and learn a little more about the best lenses and what they will be used for. Those lenses that everyone should have in their camera bag include:

The Standard Lens- Typically just a normal lens that is a shorter length and may be fixed in length, these are going to give you what you need for a standard photo. On an SLR, standard lenses may be considered 35-80 in most cases although the professional photog would  argue that they aren’t “standard” if they are movable in nature..i.e. zoom style. That’t actually true, but if you have just one lens, get a 35-80mm which gives you a ton of options.. Generally they will be an F2 and will give you a bit more light so that you can take photos just about anywhere. These are something that may come standard with your camera or are the recommended lens if you don’t have any others. One good solid standard lens is a necessity.

A Wide Angle is also nearly a necessity. If you want to see more of the background as well as your focal point, a wide angle is going to give you a dramatic effect. Normally the wide angle lens is oin to be a bit shorter and will probably still have that ability to give you a little more light in them. They are usually an f/2 aperture and may be 24-50 mm. There are other wide angles known as fish-eyes that are super wide angled lenses that will give you a birds eye view of anything in your imagery.

The Zoom lens. My absolute favorite it gives you a plentiful number of ways to use it if you don’t want to carry anything else around with you. They are available in a huge array of sizes such as 35-70 or 35-80 or 80-200mm. They can get a bit more costly but are definitely worth your while to have at  least one. They help to pull things up for you and give you great animal and weather photos like you’re sitting on top of the item you’re photographing.

Telephoto- My second favorite has to be the telephoto that really brings the world up close and personal. Telephoto lenses bring you things like your children coming down the water slide, or the polar bear out on the ice a half mile away. You won’t ever regret having a solid telephoto lens.

Bottom line–get as many good camera lenses as you can afford. Experiment with them to get the best images that you can get. If you’re using one of the good SLR cameras, you’re not out a dime. Delete the bad results, keep the good ones and start all over again.

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Being the novice photographer that I am, I am constantly looking for information to help me get up to speed on the subject. Mark hit the nail on the head in this article giving the reader a great perspective from an avid shutterbug’s point of view. One of the areas in photography that I have much to learn is about photography lenses. Mark talks about when he jumped head first in to photography in the early 1980s, the camera and lenses he started out with, and the type of photos he liked to take (and still likes to take).

One of the best aspects of this article for me was that he actually goes into some detail explaining various types of camera lenses including: Wide Angle, Standard, Zoom, Telephoto, and Specialty lenses. If there’s one thing I knew little about it was the various lenses, what types of photographs they were good for taking, and what actually made them well suited for those shots. Mark does a good job of giving us a quick overview of each. He goes into enough detail to make you hungry to learn more.

If you get a chance, jump on over to Photography Lenses – What You Need to Know to read the entire article. It’s an easy read that gives you some good perspective.

Here at The Photography Lenses Blog we’ll keep bringing you great articles like Mark’s as we come across them. If you’ve got some photography stories or information you’d like to share with us drop us a note or leave us a comment. We’d love to hear from you as we learn and grow.

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Look for part 2 of Rob’s basics in Photography Lenses in a coming post.

Thanks Rob, enjoy…

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