Which lenses do you need

Episode 201 - Find out why you need to buy professional glass.

The Transcript page - https://photographysidehustle.com/201

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Transcript

Hey, how's it going? I'm Andy Jones, and this is episode 201 of the Photography Side Hustle podcast.

Okay, so this week I'm going to go over lenses. Now I went over the different lens mounts last week, so I'm not going to go over again. If you need to know about lens mounts, just have a listen to last week's podcast. 

The first thing is you need to know whether your camera has a full-frame or a cropped sensor. 

A full-frame sensor is the same size as a 35 mm film frame, which is 36 mm by 24 mm. The reason for this is that back in the day, when everyone was shooting film, the lenses were made relative to being used on a film camera. That is all the lenses produced an image that filled the 35x24 mm film frame. 

When the first digital sensors were made, they covered a smaller area than the 36x24 mm film frame. Later on, they developed a full-frame sensor that was 36x24mm. 

Okay, let's look at the four main sensor sizes used today. They are micro 4/3, APS-C, full-frame, and medium format. Now I'm going to disregard the medium format cameras because they have a huge sensor, and it's not relevant to what I'm going to tell you about with the lenses. They probably only account for maybe one or 2% of the market, if that. There are also other sensor sizes used in drones and action cameras, and again, I'm not even going to get into those. 

So we're going to concentrate on micro 4/3, APS-C, and full-frame sensors. 

When you put a 100 mm lens on a full-frame camera, it acts like a 100 mm lens. That is, it gives you an image that fills the sensor. 

Like I said, the full-frame sensor is 36 mm x 24 mm. If you are using an APS-C camera, the sensor size is approximately 23x15 mm and if you're shooting with micro 4/3 body. This sensor is only 17x13 mm, which is pretty much half the size of a full-frame sensor.

So if you take that same 100 mm lens and put it on an APS-C body, it will only record an image that is 23x15 mm, even though the lens was casting an image that is 36x24. It gives the effect of using a longer lens.

This is why they call them crop sensors. They only record the area covered by the smaller sensor. 

If you have an APS-C or micro 4/3 body, you need to look at lenses in a different way. You need to use a crop factor or multiplier when considering lenses.

For an APS-C camera body, you use a multiplier of 1.5. I think Canon is slightly different at 1.6, but just use 1.5 for easy reference. For a micro 4/3 body, the multiplier is 2 because its sensor is pretty much half the size of a full-frame sensor. 

So the 100 mm lens on an APS-C body is multiplied by 1.5, making it the equivalent of 150 mm. 

The same lens on the micro 4/3 body is multiplied by 2, making it the equivalent of a 200 mm lens.

If you are using an APS-C body and would like to use a 50 mm lens, you are probably better off buying a 35 mm lens because 35 multiplied by 1.5 equals 52.5 mm. 

Back when I wanted to shoot real estate, the ideal lens was and still is 16 mm. I was using Canon APS-C camera bodies, so I had to buy a lens that went down to 10 mm. 10x1.6 = 16. 

Okay, so we've got that out of the way. 

When you look at lenses on a website, they come in all prices from $150 to multiple thousands. You've basically got three levels of lenses. They are the cheaper hobbyist lenses, which you will pay maybe $500 for. You have the intermediate lenses that are going to range from $500 to $1,000, and then you've got the full professional lenses that can go up to many, many thousands.

Quality comes at a price. 

Why is there such a price difference? 

Well, lenses are all about how much light they can take in and how sharp the images are. The majority of professional lenses have a fixed aperture, whereas hobbyist lenses have variable apertures. The fixed aperture allows professional photographers to use the lens wide open. So if a zoom lens is an f/2.8, it can zoom in, and the aperture will stay at f/2.8 or whatever the aperture is that they want. 

If the lens has a variable aperture like the 18-55 mm kit lens, which has an aperture range from f/3.5-f/5.6. That means when the lens is used at 18 mm, the widest aperture you can use is f/3.5 and then when you zoom in all the way to 55 mm, the widest aperture you can use is f/5.6.

That means if you set a zoom lens with a fixed 2.8 aperture to 55 mm, it would let in four times more light than the f/5.6 lens. Now I'm not going to get into F-stops. If you want to know more about stops of light, you need to listen to the exposure triangle episode. That was episode 7, and I repeated it for episode 58.

Anyway, four times more light is a game-changer. 

Another plus for lenses with a low aperture number like f/2.8, f/2, f/1.4 and f/1.2 is that when you use the lens wide open at its widest aperture, you can get a very shallow depth of field and a blurry out-of-focus background, which is perfect for portraits.

The other thing that pro lenses have is a way better build quality. The downside of the better build quality is the weight. My 28-70 lens weighs over 3 lbs, and that is just the lens. The lens elements, in some cases, are cut one at a time, like one of the elements in the Canon 100-300mm. It has a total of 23 elements, that is, 23 individual lenses that move as you zoom the lens. The price for this lens is currently $10,600 USD.

So what do pros shoot?

When you watch a sporting event, you'll see the photographers with the huge lenses. Most of those lenses are 400 mm, 500 mm, 600 mm, and as big as 800 mm. None of them has variable apertures; they all have fixed apertures. 

Their clients are magazines or social media sites that pay them top dollar for the best possible images. They don't want out-of-focus images because they use cheap lenses. They want the best possible results.

Last year, I watched a video by a top Motorsport photographer, and he was going through all the equipment that he used. By far the most used piece of equipment apart from his camera bodies was his 400 mm f/2.8 lens. A lens like that would cost you over $13,000 USD at the moment. But that is what it takes to get the incredible images that he produces. 

If you want to shoot weddings or portraits, you're going to want some good professional lenses. 

If you want to make money shooting landscapes, you really don't need to get the best available. You can get an F4 lens instead of an F2.8. F4 lenses sometimes can be as much as $1,000 cheaper, and there's not that much difference when you're shooting a f8 and f11 to get your images. You could even get by using an intermediate fixed-aperture lens.

When you're just starting out, consider buying used. Now I say this all the time, but it can save you an awful lot of money and get you to where you want to be so much faster. 

There is nothing you can buy that will improve the quality of your photography more than a professional lens. An average lens on a really good body won't be as good as a pro lens on an average body.

Lenses are what photography is all about. Start thinking about lenses instead of camera bodies. It's the best way to improve your photography. 

Okay, I think I covered everything there. There might be something I missed, but I'll tag it on in the next episode. 

Right then, I hope you found that useful. I'll be back next week with some more waffle. Talk to you soon. Bye