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Inspired Magazine: 10 Extremely Useful DSLR Camera Lenses.

Content farm pablum. Did this tell you anything you didn’t already know? Would you make a purchasing decision from this? I sure as hell wouldn’t.

Here are a couple of really useful suggestions, mostly aimed towards Canon, because that’s what I own:

1. Wide. The Sigma 12-24 is worth a serious look. Big, heavy, just plain weird. Only buy this lens if you want rectilinear (no distorted lines) images. Can be extremely handy in architectural situations. I would have purchased this lens for my own use, but you need to be in a location with good photo stores who have multiple copies. The manufacturing on the lens is quite variable and you need to try a few to get a ‘good one’. Test it on your own camera, in-store, at various f-stops. If you’re intending to someday move to a full frame sensor from an APS-C camera, it’s a dandy solution. Otherwise, the Canon 10-22 EF-S is perfectly good, and the Nikon 14-24 is UNBELIEVABLE (both in performance and price). If I still had a slew of architecture clients, I’d switch over to Nikon just because of that one lens.

2. Long. The 75-300 IS Canon EF. This is the ‘sleeper’ L lens in Canon’s lineup. AF’s slow, so don’t buy this for birds or sports, but it beats anything else in it’s price range for sharpness. MAKE SURE IT’S THE IS VERSION. Note Canon now has an “L” lens in this range, that’s about three times the price. The 70-200’s are nice (if you don’t need the 2.8 wide aperture, the f/4’s are significantly cheaper - but if you’re doing any portraiture at all, don’t waste your time, do the 2.8 IS and feel the burn in your wallet), but I seem to always want more range. I constantly rent the 100-400 L. Despite its many quirks, I keep coming back to it time and time again. I’ve not found a suitable replacement from other manufacturers that performs as well in so many situations.

3. Get yourself a fixed-focal lens. A ‘normal’ lens on an APS-C would be a 35mm; not many good ones out there. Read the reviews to match your preferred strengths, but always remember that any fixed-focal lens is light-years sharper than any zoom. I nabbed a 60mm Canon EF-S macro, because I wanted the ~90mm length for portraits (APS-C). The super-sharpness means I need to do some retouching on portraits, but using the adjust brush in Lightroom with clarity slammed to 0 is a fine trick to smooth out facial lines and blemishes. Apart from that, any of the manual-focus fixed-focal Zeiss lenses are to die for in spite of some weaknesses (which may be strengths, depending on your use). They have a certain look and feel, heavy vignetting at wide apertures and require a certain working style, but the results are characteristic enough that you can identify them immediately.

There now. That’s more like “extremely useful” now, isn’t it? Remember, double-check my opinions. Lens tech is changing rapidly.

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