The Right Lens – Third Update

Note: This is an article I publish often. It always bears repeating with new examples.

The Right Lens – Third Update

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.

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 on location with all my studio lights. 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 downtown Houston, Texas on a recent trip, 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. I also added some extra tones to the image in Photoshop.

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. Another use for this lens is OUTDOOR PORTRAITURE because with the background really soft, (due to the limited depth-of-field of telephoto lenses), you can still shoot at a small enough aperture to render all facial detail tack sharp.

I got my iPhone 13Pro back in 2022 and have been doing various experiments with it. It is head-and-shoulders above the old iPhone 6S Plus I was using:

Note the three separate lenses. These are accessed by tapping an on-screen button that enables you to switch from one lens to the other. The only problem is when you need to make a distant subject larger, you can go to about a 15x enlargement, but there will be so much movement that you cannot hand-hold the camera with that amount of telephoto increment and the image will suffer some breakdown in sharpness, I have found. So, I don’t find it to be a complete substitute for regular cameras, but it does a nice job when you don’t ask too much of it.

Over the years, because I am more aware of the uses for each lens, I have stayed away from variable focus (zoom) lenses because the temptation is to use it to take the place of making better compositions. It is easy to rotate the “zoom” barrel of a lens to get a better composition rather than actually move the camera. But for most people, they aren’t aware that changing the focal length of a lens alters its characteristics as well. It changes not only the composition, but the focus, the lens performance (especially with “kit” lenses), its sharpness and the nature of the results. Also, I have found from experimentation and lots of use, that zoom lenses just are not quite as sharp as primes. Yes, there are good ones and you can get sharp images if you use them carefully, but many photographers just see them as time and trouble savers.

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 rewarded with great images.