John C. Doornkamp
LENSES

THE QUALITY OF YOUR IMAGE RESTS MORE WITH YOUR LENS THAN WITH YOUR CAMERA

Whatever the make of lens, the best lenses amongst its products, will be the "prime lenses".

Prime lenses are generally built using the best quality glass.

They are carefully designed to minimise loss of light and to be free of light reflection within the lens.

A prime lens is normally a fixed focal length lens.

Since it is a premium lens within the manufacturer's range it will be amongst the more expensive.


Few photographers choose their lenses first and the camera body second. It normally starts with a camera choice followed by the choice of lenses.


Logically it might be better to choose the lenses first and the camera that goes with them second.


However, the best advice that I can give is that you search for a list of the lenses available for your camera, rank them according to cost, cross out all of those that are beyond your budget, cross out the bottom third of those that are left, choose your lenses from the remainder.


If your budget allows include a prime lens with a fixed focal length around 50-80mm, and another at (around) 18-24mm.


For the rest I would choose a highly rated wide-angle zoom (say 18-70mm) and a medium telephoto lens covering the range from 80-200mm.


My next purchase would be a 1.4x or 2.0x teleconverter for those times when a longer telephoto distance is required.

 

I always search the available third-party lens choices as well as those of the camara manufacturer.

For example, with my Fuji X-T cameras I use lenses made by Samyang as well as Fuji lenses.

In my Samyang range there is a 12mm, a 50mm (f/1.2) and a 100mm macro- lens.

They are all brilliant, and available at a much lower price than the Fujinon equivalents. For UK try here 

and in the US try here.

Further savings can be made if you search on one of the MPB sites: MPB (UK);  MPB (USA), or MPB (EU).