Things to Know about Photographic Lenses before Buying One

Have you ever wondered how do they give professional headshots? How does fashion photography get immense clarity in pictures? Obviously Camera Brand, Right?? No, the answer is Photographic Lenses. Shocked? Here you need to dive into the world of these lenses if you are going to start your journey in photography services. Let’s start: A photographic lens or a camera lens is the assembly of lenses or an optical lens used in conjunction with a camera body and a mechanism to make images of objects of either on photographic film or the other Storage Media.

How do the lenses differ from each other?

Well, there is no such difference between lenses used for a video camera, a telescope, a still camera, a microscope or other equipment but yet the design and construction of these lenses are different. Moreover, a lens might be permanently fixed in a camera, or it might be interchangeable with the lenses of different focal lengths, apertures, and other properties. The topic is getting clarified. Isn’t it?

Construction of a lens

Before buying a photography camera, you must be familiar with the construction of a camera lens:

- A camera lens contains several complex elements, and these elements may themselves comprise a group of lenses cemented together.
- The front element is expository to the performance of the whole assembly. Added to this, in all modern lenses, the surface is coated to reduce abrasion, flare and surface reflectance and to adjust color balance.
- Chiefly the lens is focused by calibrating the distance from the lens assembly to the image plane or by moving the lens assembly elements.

Most of the elements of the camera lens are made up of glass, and it is used most commonly to make the camera lens elements, being scratch resistant and great optical properties. Other materials are also used, such as fluorite, quartz glass, plastics like acrylic and even germanium and meteoritic glass. Plastics are not merely used for the outside elements but the cheapest lenses as they scratch easily.
For minimizing lens flare and other unwanted effects, most of the lenses are multi-coated, these days.

Knowing about focal length

Usually, the focal lengths are specified in millimeters (mm), but the previous one was used to mark in inches or centimeters (cm) or. For a given film or sensor size, specified by the length of the diagonal, a lens may be deciphered as a:

Normal Lens: An angle of view of the diagonal about 50o and a focal length approximately equal to the image diagonal.
Wide-angle Lens: Angle of view wider than 600 and focal length which is comparably shorter than normal.
Long-focus Lens: Any lens with a focal length than the diagonal measure of the film or sensor. The angle of view is narrower.

You must have noticed the photographers in the photo studio talking about these, haven’t you? So now as we are done with the introduction and a bit about the construction of these lenses, it’s time to get into the:-

Types of Lenses

“Close-up” or macro

A macro lens is applicable in "macro" or "close-up" (term differs from the compositional term close up) photography is any lens that produces an image on the focal plane, i.e., one-quarter of the life-size (1:4) to the same size (1:1) as the subject being imaged. It can is a special lens corrected optically for work closed up, or it can be any lens modified to bring the focal plane "forward" for very close photography mostly of living organisms like insects or very small subjects, in which the size of the subject in the photograph is greater than life size.

Zoom

Lenses that have a focal length that varies as internal elements are moved, typically by pressing a button or rotating the barrel which activates an electric motor, are known to be Zoom Lenses. They have widely used for small-format cameras of all types: still and cine cameras with fixed or interchangeable lenses. Have you ever seen newborn photos? Are the newborns as big as the photos illustrate?

Special-purpose
Process lenses: generally intended for use at a specific distance.
Apochromat (apo) lenses: have added a correction for chromatic aberration.
Lenses for aerial photography and a lot more.

To sum up the topic, photographic lenses play a vital role in the world of photography. Hence, pick one that best fits for you. Which lens are you going to buy? Let us know in the comment section below.