FAQ — “Which lens should I Buy?”

As someone who is pretty good at tak­ing pho­to­graphs, I get stopped all the time in the street. “Hey, Tom! How are you?” they say, “I saw those shots on your awe­some site of Ocean Col­our Scene. Man, I wish I was there!” Usu­ally at this point they’re look­ing in their pock­ets for their auto­graph books. “I’ve been get­ting into pho­to­graphy myself, what kind of lens do you recommend?”

Well, okay, it doesn’t nor­mally go like that. Usu­ally, the people want­ing my auto­graph are wear­ing brightly col­oured water­proof jack­ets, car­ry­ing clip­boards and ask­ing for money. I nor­mally tell them to shove it. Unless she‘s cute.

Sorry, I digress. I often trawl the dis­cus­sion groups on Flickr and one ques­tion that pops up incred­ibly often is in regard to which lens to buy: In most instances, the per­son has nar­rowed it down to a few and is ask­ing for help decid­ing between them from those that may also have that lens - stand­ard stuff for dis­cus­sion groups like this, and it can get quite inter­est­ing look­ing at the tech­nical nitty-gritty of it all. On semi-rare occa­sions though, you get the likes of the following:

“I’ve just got my Sony A230 the other week with the 18-50mm and the 55-200mm kit lenses, and I want to buy another lens. I want to get bet­ter pictures”

Fol­low­ing this, you get a very long thread full of well-intentioned sug­ges­tions, where few of them will actu­ally be of any use to the ori­ginal poster, and even less will be afford­able. I’d like to help, but not like this — instead, I’d like to show you how to nar­row down the choice and work out what you need your­self. I’ll teach you the Zen of Gear Acquisition.

Think of me as the bas­tard off­spring of Mar­tin Lewis and Buddha.

Any­way…

Let’s look at why all the responses are — for lack of a kinder term — rub­bish. I have found that it seems to revolve around one par­tic­u­lar word in that sen­tence: “better”.

Think of it another way — you need a new car, want a “better” one than before and you know very little about cars, but you do just so hap­pen to know someone who’s pretty clued up about motor­ing. He drives you to the nearest Mer­cedes gar­age and con­vinces you that the SLR is def­in­itely the car for you. It’s more power­ful than most cars, pretty good look­ing, nice interior and all that. How­ever, he’s for­got­ten that you only really need it to get from work and back, and that you live out in the coun­try with no tarred roads to travel on, and you’re drive­way is a 25% gradient uphill. Really, “better” for you would be a Land Rover — that’ll be the last time you take Michael Schumacher’s advice.

Intro­spect

How do we avoid this hap­pen­ing then? By doing just that — ask­ing ques­tions. Being crit­ical and ana­lyt­ical of your­self and your work is a vital skill for all pho­to­graph­ers (and to be hon­est, I think many of us can bene­fit from a real­ity check once in a while). Be spe­cific — if you do not like a pic­ture, think about exactly why you do not like it. Write it all down some­where, all the prob­lems you see with it that you would want to change.

Now things get bru­tal. You’ll have heard the expres­sion “a bad work­man always blames his tools?” Your lens is a tool, and I bet you most of the things you lis­ted are your fault, not the lens’s. The kit lenses are not the greatest in the world, but in the right hands they can achieve sur­pris­ing res­ults — they really are bet­ter than a lot of people give them credit for.



Exper­i­ment…

…A lot. Most lenses (even some very expens­ive ones) work at their best in a fairly nar­row range. Lenses work best when light is focused pre­cisely where it needs to be, and the more extreme set­tings on the lens does push very close to the lim­its, so some­times back­ing aper­tures and zoom ranges back a little towards the middle-settings can make for bet­ter pic­tures. If you want a head start, look up reviews for the lens online, par­tic­u­larly user reviews — nor­mally, people will have found these “sweet spots” and will share happily.

Still not get­ting the res­ults you wanted? Let’s look at the kinds of things you want to shoot, and per­haps look at the little things most people dis­reg­ard. Like shoot­ing por­traits, or shoot­ing in lower light evir­on­ments? Con­sider a sep­ar­ate flash unit — used prop­erly, flash can allow for some very inter­est­ing effects. Think about it — “photo” means lights and “graph” is to record, so if you con­trol the light you con­trol the record­ing. You become an artist, rather than an observer — per­haps that thought appeals to you?

Also, a com­monly under­rated piece of gear is the tri­pod, par­tic­u­larly of land­scape work. A decent tri­pod should cost less than most lenses, but a really cheap and nasty one can ruin a shot. A good one will stay planted no mat­ter how windy things get, and allows for very long expos­ures and some poten­tially inter­est­ing effects.

Lastly, it’s also worth look­ing at your com­puter, or rather the soft­ware on it. I did things back­wards, get­ting into digital pho­to­graphy because of a need for mater­ial to work into some photo-montages I was plan­ning (and never did). With a decent image edit­ing pro­gram (some of which can be had for abso­lutely noth­ing) you open the door to a whole new world of cre­ativ­ity. One thing I will say though — don’t take a photo think­ing you’ll fix it later. Just don’t. Trust me, you won’t fix it.

Retail Ther­apy

So none of the above applies, and you’ve found some “thing” in your images you def­in­itely need a lens to improve on. By now, you’re prob­ably in the Zen mind­set I men­tioned earlier — you’re doing well, grasshopper.

At this stage, it’s still import­ant to keep a crit­ical head about you — what exactly is it you need out of your pur­chase? There is no per­fect lens in the world, so keep in mind that you will likely have to make some kind of com­prom­ise some­where along the line. A good example would be in some­thing like the Tam­ron 18-270mm super­zooms — it’s an amaz­ing zoom range, and should do vir­tu­ally all situ­ations. The prob­lem is the aper­tures are very nar­row (the max aper­tures range from f3.5–6.3). As a gig pho­to­grapher, I couldn’t make use of this lens at all as it’s just not going to per­form in low light envir­on­ments — how­ever, someone going on a back­pack­ing hol­i­day to the Phil­ip­pines is likely going to be trav­el­ling light and in con­stantly very bright con­di­tions, where these draw­backs are much less problematic.

It Really Works!

Let’s go through an example. A real life one too — let me tell you about how I decided upon my Tam­ron 17-50mm f2.8. As you know, I mainly shoot con­certs, which gen­er­ally are in poorly lit con­di­tions. I have a Sigma 30mm f1.4 already, but what with it being a fixed focal length I found it imprac­tical to use in the photo-pit — I couldn’t get wider shots as I phys­ic­ally couldn’t move fur­ther back, and I couldn’t get closer to get tighter head shots either.

So, I’ve nar­rowed things down already — I need a zoom lens, and it needs to be fast. I had a look online and whittled a list down — but what zoom range to go for? Well, my 30mm was get­ting decent shots most of the time, so I con­sidered that to be a mid-point — I want one that’s both a bit wider than that, and also with more tele­photo. There were a num­ber of lenses in the 28-70mm range, but that doesn’t give much more of a wide angle, so I ruled them out. It left me with a few choices, namely the Sigma 17-50mm f2.8 and the Tam­ron 17-50mm f2.8.

I had a look at a few reviews. I looked at past dis­cus­sions on Flickr. I asked some friends. I tried them both in a local cam­era shop. I com­pared prices. The Tam­ron fared bet­ter in all counts, so I bought it. I then went and shot Ocean Col­our Scene and the Edit­ors with the lens, and was abso­lutely ecstatic at the results.

Zen?

Maybe not, but hope­fully some of this inform­a­tion is going to be use­ful to a pro­spect­ive lens buyer. Know­ledge is power, and power can stave off GAS…