Thursday, August 11, 2011

What camera lense should I get?

An "all around" lens??? There is simply NO WAY to answer this question. For any common 35MM film camera, such as my Nikon F2, some things are pretty much standard. OK, you have a problem here, with your understanding of what a camera lens actually DOES for you. A lens, ANY lens simply transfers light falling on the front to the back and projects the light onto something behind the lens. A lens is in the simplest form, is nothing more than a piece of curved and polished GL. ANY lens only works well, the best it can, at ONE point in the range if a zoom lens. In effect, you would be better served to buy several fixed lenses over a zoom lens for the same amount of money. Your item #2 is not logical. Image stabilization is a function of the CAMERA electronics NOT the LENS. Manual and auto focus is a function of the CAMERA controls, NOT the LENS. 18MM and under is a "fish-eye" lens, and NO lens will cover the range of 18MM to 70MM for focal length. The best you can do is 2 to 3 times the shortest focal length for the longest focal length. In addition to a number of fixed lenses (12mm [the fish-eye!], 24mm, 32mm, 50mm, 100mm, 135mm, 200mm, 500mm [long telephoto]) I have 3 zoom lenses, 70 to 210, 35 to 135 and 28 to 50. Each covers a different range of what you can do. The 70 to 210 is a medium to long telephoto. The 35 to 135 is a wide angle to medium telephoto, and the 28 to 50 is wide angle to normal. The 12mm fish-eye has a front filter size of 70mm in diameter and it covers about 150 degrees of width in the field of view, and I bought it for a song and dance in Hong Kong at a used camera store. I used it one time, for a series of pictures where I placed the camera on the back, looking up from the bottom of a crater, with a sequence timer to snap pictures every several minutes to take pictures of the people looking down into the depression in the Earth.

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