The Ultimate Guide To Understanding Camera Lenses Variety

Camera lenses are an essential component of photography, focusing light from the viewfinder onto the camera's image sensor. The type of lens used can significantly impact the final image, and there is a wide range of lenses available on the market, each designed for specific situations and effects.

The sheer variety of lenses can be overwhelming for photographers, from expensive prime lenses that deliver exceptional image quality to versatile zoom lenses that offer a range of focal lengths. Wide-angle lenses are perfect for landscape photographers, while telephoto lenses are ideal for capturing distant subjects like wildlife. Super-telephoto lenses provide an even greater magnification, allowing photographers to capture distant subjects without physically approaching them. Fisheye lenses offer an ultra-wide field of view with distinctive distortion, commonly used in abstract and security photography.

Additionally, macro lenses facilitate extreme close-ups, infrared lenses capture invisible infrared light, and tilt-shift lenses manipulate perspective, making them popular in architecture and fine art photography.

With such a diverse array of lenses, photographers can enhance their creativity and capture unique images, but the vast options also present a challenge in deciding which lenses are essential for their craft.

Zoom lenses

If you're travelling light, you can find zoom lenses with much more range, such as an 18-270 mm, allowing you to photograph both close-up and in the distance. This makes a good zoom range ideal for budding photographers or anyone needing to photograph in a diverse range of scenarios or conditions.

Prime lenses

Overall, prime lenses are a fantastic option for photographers, offering affordability, compactness, high image quality, and versatility.

Wide-angle lenses

There are three main types of wide-angle lenses:

• Fish-eye wide-angle lens: These lenses have an angle of view of up to 180 degrees, allowing you to see half of a full rotation. They have a distinctive, hemispherical type of lens distortion, and produce images with curved lines.
• Rectilinear wide-angle lens: Any wide-angle lens that is not a fisheye lens is rectilinear. These lenses also suffer from distortion but are able to keep lines straighter than fish-eye lenses.
• Tilt-shift wide-angle lens: These lenses allow you to correct for perspective distortion. They project much larger images than the full-frame sensor and can be moved horizontally and vertically on the plane parallel to the sensor. They are very expensive and popular with professional architectural and fine-art photographers.

Some popular wide-angle lenses include:

• Canon RF 24mm F/1.8 Macro IS STM
• Nikon NIKKOR Z 20mm F/1.8 S
• Sony E 20mm F/2.8 SEL20F28
• Canon EF 16-35mm f/2.8 III
• Canon TS-E 24mm f/4L UD
• Nikon 24mm f/1.4G
• Nikon 20mm f/1.8G
• Nikon 10-24mm f/3.5-4.5
• Nikon 14-24mm f/2.8G
• Nikon 16-35mm f/4 VR
• Canon 16-35mm f/2.8 L II
• Canon 24mm f/1.4 L II
• Canon 28mm f/1.8 USM
• Canon 10-18mm f/4.5-5.6 IS
• Canon 14mm f/2.8L II
• Canon 17-40mm f/4L
• Sigma 24mm f/1.4 ART
• Tokina 11-16mm f/2.8 AT II
• Sigma 8-16mm f/4.5-5.6 DC
• Tokina 17-35mm f/4

Telephoto lenses

A telephoto lens is a type of long-focus lens used in photography and cinematography. It is designed so that its physical length is shorter than its focal length. This is achieved by incorporating a telephoto group—a special lens group that extends the light path to create a long-focus lens in a shorter overall design.

The focal length of a telephoto lens typically ranges from 100mm to 600mm, and sometimes even more. These lenses are usually bulky and may require a tripod for support. They are often more expensive, making them less practical for amateur photographers.

There are three subtypes of telephoto lenses: short or portrait (85–135 mm in 35 mm film format), medium (135–300 mm in 35 mm film format), and super (over 300 mm in 35 mm film format).

The concept of the telephoto lens was first described by Johannes Kepler in 1611 and later re-invented by Peter Barlow in 1834. However, it was Thomas Rudolphus Dallmeyer who is credited with the invention of the photographic telephoto lens in 1891, although it was also independently invented by others around the same time.

When choosing a telephoto lens, it is important to consider your specific needs and budget. While they offer a range of benefits, they may also come with drawbacks such as size, weight, and cost. Additionally, the superzoom range might cause decision fatigue, as having too many options can sometimes make it harder to capture the perfect shot.

Super-telephoto lenses

The most important feature of super-telephoto lenses is their focal length. The ability to photograph and record images from an extremely long distance is a significant advantage, especially when dealing with subjects that are inaccessible or easily spooked. The most common use for lenses longer than 300mm would be in sports and wildlife photography.

Prime lenses tend to dominate in terms of quality and length, with the longest offerings currently available being a few 800mm primes, although longer focal lengths have been available in the past. This compares to zoom lenses, which tend to top out around 600mm at their longest reach. While primes can be longer and faster, zooms offer greater flexibility to cover a huge array of super-tele focal lengths within a single lens.

The second most important feature of any lens is the aperture. With super-telephotos, extremely fast apertures are less common, and the fastest options are also significantly larger and more expensive than more conservative, slower models. For example, comparing 400mm lenses, an f/2.8 lens is significantly larger and heavier than an f/4 version.

Image stabilisation (IS) is almost necessary when attempting to handhold super-telephoto lenses. This is because the longer lengths show more camera shake, and the heft of these lenses makes them more difficult to handhold. Modern advancements from most manufacturers are rated for several stops of compensation, which is exceptionally useful when trying to shoot handheld.

Another benefit of super-telephoto lenses is the multiple IS modes available. Usually, there are specific settings for panning and general handheld shooting. This allows shooters to track horizontal motion more easily in the scene and capture it. A side benefit to IS is that it will usually stabilise your viewfinder, as well as your final image. This makes composition much easier, since the image you see won’t be jittery and shaking.

Nearly every piece of optical technology is utilised in super-telephoto lenses, from nano coatings to prevent flaring, to fluorite elements that control aberrations. Most common are extra-low dispersion elements, which work with other elements to produce the sharpest, most detailed images possible by reducing visible aberrations and correcting for distortion. Beyond just improving image quality, Diffractive Optics or Phase Fresnel lenses are used to reduce the overall size and weight of the lens while also reducing various aberrations.

Some popular super-telephoto lenses include:

• Canon RF 800mm f/11 IS STM Lens
• Canon RF 600mm f/4 L IS USM Lens
• Sony FE 400mm f/2.8 GM OSS Lens
• Sony FE 600mm f/4 GM OSS Lens
• Olympus M.Zuiko Digital ED 300mm f/4 IS PRO Lens
• Fujifilm XF100-400 f/4-5.6 R LM OIS WR

Frequently asked questions