How To Choose The Right Lens For Your Images

Note: This article was originally published last year and updated back in February. I have added some new information here.

How To Choose The Right Lens For Your Images

by William Lulow

Every photographer seems to have his or her “go to” lens for most projects, but we should all remember that each lens has its own particular set of characteristics and that’s what makes it good or bad for any certain job that we may ask of it. Wide angle lenses take in more of the scene, but in order to do so, parts of the subject are rendered smaller in the frame. The opposite is true of a long telephoto lens. A “normal” lens for any format camera is designed to be somewhere in between what the wide angle or telephoto can do. So, it’s important to determine, before you go out to shoot something or someone, just what you intend to capture.

With this in mind, I thought I would present my take on how I do this on a daily basis. My basic “kit” contains four lenses: a 20mm wide angle, a 60mm macro, an 85mm and a 135mm telephoto. These can cover the basic assignments I am usually asked to do. The wide angle is used for events and interiors, the macro, for product and closeup work, the short and long telephotos for portraits and some action-type images. I don’t like to use zoom lenses because I find these primes to be sharper, but I also have two camera bodies so that I can mount a telephoto and a wide angle at the same time. This usually takes care of situations in which I might need each, and it lets me still use my sharp prime lenses. My only limitation is that I use only one ON-CAMERA flash for my event coverage. I probably wouldn’t use my telephoto for that kind of job, so I am pretty sure that my wide angle lens would be able to capture most action indoors. Outdoors, I can use both my camera bodies since I would not be using my flash. If I started getting bookings requiring more indoor shooting, I would add another on-camera flash and probably another radio transmitter as well to use with the second body.

When I am shooting in the studio environment, these days it’s mostly doing portraiture or making professional headshots for my clients. My lens of choice for this is my Canon 85mm f/1.8 lens. On each of my crop sensor cameras, this focal length represents a slight telephoto, one that will actually compress facial details a bit. My intention is to render the human face as “normal” as possible. This lens achieves that very well. It is also, what is considered a “fast” lens due to its larger size. When I use it in the studio, however, I am not as concerned with its speed as much as the fact that I can use it stopped down to f/11 and render all facial details extremely sharp. Of course, when you are shooting with lights in a studio, your exposures are really determined by the lighting and not so much by the lens itself. But, I have found that any digital lens performs better when it is stopped down a couple of stops rather than used “wide open.”

This is a recent headshot made in the studio. You can tell that the face is in proportion because the three main elements (bottom of the chin to the bottom of the nose, bottom of nose to eyebrows and eyebrows to top of forehead) are all roughly the same size. So, the face looks like it has been rendered the right size. This lens accomplishes this just about each and every time. The camera is on a tripod and is placed directly in front of the subject, not higher or lower. That’s how the correct proportions are achieved.

If I am just touring or walking around a city, town or other locale, my lens of choice is my 20mm f/2.8. This is a slight wide-angle lens for my digital cameras. If you think of a traditional 35mm film camera, like an old Nikon F, for instance, they were designed to work with lenses that covered a piece of 35mm film which was approximately 36mm long by 25mm wide. This is now referred to in the digital world as “full frame.” Today’s “cropped sensor” cameras are designed to cover a smaller size than that, roughly 22mm instead of the normal 36mm. So, a 20mm lens will actually cover more of the cropped sensor than it would a full-frame one. Therefore, it acts more like a 32mm lens than an actual 20mm one. Since many digital cameras these days are of the cropped sensor variety, you need to know about this before you decide to buy either a camera or a lens.

One of the reasons I like this wide angle lens for touring is because I can compose a landscape, say, with the knowledge that I can crop it tighter in post production and otherwise alter its field-of-view somewhat while still retaining the characteristics of the lens itself. Here is an example:

This is a view of a town’s main street shot with my 20mm f/2.8 lens. In post production, I cropped the image so that it would resemble an image made by a more “normal” lens for a 35mm size camera. Everything, though, is rendered sharp from foreground to background, which is one of the characteristics of a wide angle lens. These lenses have the ability to provide greater depth-of-field which means that most everything in the frame will be sharp. That’s the main reason that I carry this lens attached to one of my camera bodies almost all the time, if I am just walking around looking for images.

Whenever I am looking for great depth-of-field and clarity for my product images, my go to lens is the 60mm macro:

This lens is super sharp and can stop its aperture down to f/32 for extreme depth. Here’s are a couple of sample product shots made with this lens (Note the crisp detail):

When you want to isolate one subject and make it stand out from a background, the best lens to use is a telephoto. One that I like to use is the 135mm f/2 lens. Now one of the characteristics of a long lens is that it has a very narrow depth-of-field. That means that if you focus on one single subject, the rest of the image is usually out of focus. Here’s the lens I like:

Here’s the kind of image you can make with it:

Notice how the background is very soft (out of focus) and the eye is directed to the subject alone. This is the kind of shot this lens does best.

So, the take away from all this is that photographers need to be mindful of the kinds of images they are setting out to make when they are actually working. Each lens has a particular set of characteristics that make it the right choice for certain jobs. If you keep those things in mind, your efforts will be very rewarding. One other caveat here is that most cameras that are built into cell phones, unless they are like the newest iterations which have three or more lenses, basically are intended to provide good, overall images of what the person is photographing. You need to be aware of the type of image you want to make. If you use your phone’s camera on it’s “telephoto” lens setting, you need to be aware that it will record any camera movement, even a very slight one, so your images might not be as sharp as you might like. In these cases, put your iPhone on a tripod.

The other thing I haven’t mentioned until now is how the new mirrorless cameras work. I finally had a chance to look at the Canon R5, to hold it, look through the viewfinder and get a sense of what it can do. First of all, it is a fair amount lighter than my DSLRs because there is no prism, no group of mirrors which serve to turn the image around and make it right-side-up, which is what all the mirrors do in a prism. Instead, this is all accomplished digitally. The viewfinder therefore, is a bit larger and it felt more like looking into my old view cameras with their large groundglass viewers. I think they enable better compositions because you can see more of the edge-to-edge coverage. If I were to switch to these cameras, I would need an adapter ($99) so that I could use my existing lenses. Also, the camera itself, now costs around $3,800! So, even though I like the new cameras, making a switch now is probably not a great investment idea for my business. My current DSLRs work just great. I might switch to one sometime in the future though, because I’m still looking forward to doing more traveling and they are certainly lighter. So, we will see.

But these are the lenses I use currently. There are some good and expensive variable focus (zoom) lenses available, but the really good ones are big and expensive, so for now, these lenses cover just about anything I am asked to shoot currently.