The best digital camera lens for the job

So what is the best digital camera lens? Ask any photographer and the answer is likely to vary. One will favour an ultra wide angle lens while another swears by his favourite telephoto.

If you do not own a digital camera with interchangeable lenses, don't click away! This page will still be useful to you. Most of today's compact digicams have a zoom lens attached that will allow you to change your angle of view to your hearts content.

A term you will often come across when learning about lens for digital cameras is "focal length". Simply put this is the physical length between the camera's sensor and the element inside the lens. Focal length is measured in millimetres. Therefore you may have a zoom lens that ranges from 7.8mm to 46.8mm like the one on my old Fuji Finepix 4900Z camera. The sales pitch for this camera would have said "equivalent to a 35-210mm lens on a 35mm camera". Why is this?

Because the sensors in one digital camera can be a different size to another camera, manufacturers tend to express the focal length of their digital camera lenses as an equivalent length to the old 35mm film camera lenses.

Being able to choose a different focal length lens for a picture taking situation is invaluable.

On another occasion you see a pretty butterfly land on a bush close by. Walking towards the bush to get close enough would scare the butterfly away. Again you zoom in to enlarge it in the frame, and therefore capture the full details of it's wings.

So, if you can't get close to the thing you want to photograph, the best digital camera lens to have at hand is a telephoto. There are other advantages to using a telephoto zoom lens which I will cover shortly.

On the other hand imagine you are at a party in a small room and want to take a photograph of your mates having fun. In this case you can't actually move back far enough to get everyone in the shot because the wall is in the way! This time you need to zoom OUT and the best digital camera lens to use would be a wide angle lens.

There are pitfalls in using an ultra wide angle lens for portrait photography. Parts of the body that are closer to the lens can seem exagerated and out of proportion. Even with a moderately wide angle as used for the photograph, right, the result is somewhat different to our normal view and therefore looks slightly "wrong".

So sometimes it is obvious which is the best digital camera lens to choose due to the situation the photographer is in.

But we don't need to stop there. Using a digital zoom lens to its full can open up all sorts of creative possibilities.

Using a digital camera telephoto lens

Let me use the following as an example. I'm sure you have been stuck in a traffic jam before? In front of you are many cars, moving slowly or even not at all. As you look ahead it seems as though each car is close behind the one in front with hardly any gap. However, in actual fact, there is normally a space between each vehicle, easily seen by a passing pedestrian who has a different angle of view.

This effect is heightened by long focal length telephoto lenses and can be used creatively.

Another feature of a long lens relates to how much of what you see through the viewfinder, or on the LCD, is in focus. This introduces another digital photography term, depth of field.

Long lenses tend to have a narrower depth of field which means that, from front to back, only a narrow section is in focus. The closer you focus, the narrower this band becomes, as we saw in the butterfly photo earlier.

This narrow depth of field can perhaps make a telephoto the best digital camera lens for portrait photography, as distracting background details can be kept out of focus, concentrating the attention of the viewer on the person in the photograph. Of course keeping the camera further away also helps the subject of the photo to feel more at ease, hopefully resulting in a more natural photograph.

Using a digital camera wide angle lens

Hold your hand up in front of your face and look past it to something further away. Your hand looks huge in comparison doesn't it? Even bigger than that TV across the room? Of course it isn't really larger, it just looks that way because it is closer to your eyes. This is the effect you can achieve with a wide angle lens. Getting close to something in the foreground can make it look much bigger than it really is, dwarfing distant objects.

In the photo of the church I used a wide angle lens to make the tombstone in the foreground a more important part of the picture. (This is ideal for anyone recording their family history and wanting to put the gravestone into context, by the way.) For privacy on the net, I obscured the name on the tombstone, in the full size photograph you can read every word on it!

Luckily for me, this church had a ditch and wall around the perimeter. All I needed to do was jump down into the ditch, balance the camera on the wall, compose the picture, pick the correct shutter speed and aperture, and shoot. Normally I would have to sit or lay down on the grass to get a shot from this angle!

Before I took this shot, I gave some thought as to what was the best digital camera lens to use. I decided to wait for the low winter afternoon to highlight the edge of the tombstone, further emphasing it by lifting it away from the building. I also included some bare tree branches on the right side of the photograph, both to balance the steeple on the left and to help show the season in which the photo was taken, and when the person died.

So you can see, whether you have a digital SLR camera with interchangeable lenses or a point and shoot with a zoom lens you have the opportunity to use focal length creatively as well as through necessity.

Next time you go to take a photo think first, am I using the best digital camera lens for the job or can I use a different one to make this into a great picture? Above all, have fun, and remember to experiment, after all us digital camera users do not have to pay for film do we?

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