What You Need to Know Before Buying SLR Camera Lenses? This SLR Camera Lenses Buying Guide will help you to make a decision which SLR camera lenses to buy.

Unlike DSLR camera, serious amateur and professional photographers may have more than one SLR lenses. They know exactly what lenses they need for particular photography tasks. For beginner photography, selecting the SLR lens to buy is even more confusing than the DSLR camera. The following is the SLR Camera Lenses Buying Guide – some tips that will help you choose the camera lens to buy.

1. Know What Photography Style You Prefer

If you prefer Sport style photography, then you need a very fast Telephoto lens. The lens should be fast enough – and would be great if the lens is equipped with the stabilizer feature such as IS (image stabilizer) in Canon lenses. If you like to shoot the pictures of the family indoors or the flowers in your garden, then you just need a standard lens. On the other hand when you prefer the landscape styles photography – then a wide angle lens would be your best choice.

2. Which One: Prime Lens or Zoom Lens

• Prime lens: superb quality results, light in weight, relatively inexpensive, excellent photos
• Zoom lens: adjustable zoom, you can stand in one place to get a variety of shots

Prime lens is a fixed focus lens, you cannot adjust the focus – but you have to move the camera. The great advantage of the prime lens is the superb quality images. They are lightweight and cheaper than zoom lenses. For your first lens, an 18mm – 55mm zoom lens when you bought your camera would be great. The benefits are that you can stand in one place and get the exact picture you want.

Here is the main different between the prime lens and the zoom lens:

A zoom lens is good to get started with, for example with a 28mm – 135 mm lens you can go from wide angle to telephoto. But once you find the photo passion, you can’t beat the quality of a prime lens. For more detail, check the digital SLR lenses – need to know.

3. Light Conditions or How Big Your Aperture

Light condition is a main factor for the lens speed (aka: the aperture). With a dim lighting, then you need a lens with an extremely wide maximum aperture. But if you’re a broad daylight nature buff, then the wide maximum aperture isn’t as important. All SLR camera lenses list their maximum aperture (or maximum aperture range for zoom lenses). And they list maximum, because they can always be narrowed. See also how to trick the light.

The rule of thumb is:

The wider the aperture is – the more light.

The smaller the aperture number is – the more light.

You probably find this can be very confusing. Wider aperture/smaller aperture number means more light which produce faster shutter speed (to prevent blurred motion), shallower depth of field which is generally called bokeh (focus in small area for example the face in the photo is in focus, but the background isn’t). See also exposure techniques.

So as general you can use:
f/1.4 – indoors without flash (for portraits)
f/2.8 – overcast photos
f/3.5 – Shade

Sunny doesn’t matter because you won’t use the max aperture anyway.

4. How Much Your Budget

You can either choose first party lenses (made by the same company as your camera), or third party lenses (made by different company with special mounts for different camera types such as Tamron, Tokina, or Sigma). Fist party lenses are generally higher in quality and most compatible with your camera, but generally more expensive. Third party lenses are lower in prices and have a greater variety of lens type. And also you need to know that the wider the aperture is – the more expensive.

5. Are Any Bonus Features Important?

Here’s a list of bonus features you can get with your SLR camera lenses.

• Silent auto focus feature – very essential for wildlife photography
• Full-time manual focus – when you don’t want to switch back and forth from auto to manual
• Non-rotating front element – if you like to take polarized pictures
• Crop reduction – make sure what you see in the viewfinder is the picture you get. A 35 mm type DSLR camera is a full-frame type camera
• Superior optics – self explanatory
• Image stabilization – not necessary for cameras with built in stabilization such as some types of Olympus camera.
• Internal zoom – lens stays same as zoom occurs internally

All of them will add to the price of any of the SLR camera lenses. So now you know what you need to decide… before you shop for SLR camera lenses. And you won’t waste time or money buying the wrong lens.

By: Debbie Lattuga

Debbie Lattuga is an photography enthusiast encouraging people to express themselves through photography. To find out more about SLR camera lenses, check out her blog at Best SLR Camera. She helps people find the perfect SLR camera lenses for them, without all the hassle.

See also:

• Need to know some terminology of the SLR Lenses
• Lighting photography techniques
• General photography techniques
• Digital SLR camera buyers guide