Entry #36: Choosing A Lens
Written on Jul 26th, 2008
Most compact cameras that you pick up from Future Shop only have one built in lens. In most cases, it’s a zoom lens, capable of giving you moderate wideangle coverage upwards to a decent telephoto lens. Most people probably don’t know the difference between those two, so I thought I’ll give a brief tutorial. The most well known lens is probably the 50mm prime. 50mm refers to the focal length of the lens, and prime refers to the fact that it’s a fixed focal length lens (i.e. not a zoom lens). In photography, the 50mm lens is also called a “standard” lens because it almost exactly matches the field of view of human eye. That is, if you were to look at a scene and then photograph it using a 50mm lens, it would closely match what you saw. Some people call a 50mm lens boring because it doesn’t really […]
