The wonderful thing about interchangeable lens cameras is that you can mould it to suit your shooting style simply by picking the right lens. This way, you can hold on to the body of the camera for much longer and improve your photography or videography by experimenting with newer lenses. While we would all love to go and buy all the best lenses for our camera, it’s not always practical since lenses are expensive. But for most shooting use cases, which tend to be portrait, street photography, and wildlife photography – you only really need a handful of lenses that should serve 99 percent of all your use cases.
Before we dive into the various essential lenses, there are some factors that you should be aware of before shortlisting your picks. Depending on the type of photography you’ll be doing, it’s good to check if the lens you’re buying will give you the intended framing, stabilisation, and image quality that you desire.
Basic lens characteristics to keep in mind
Focal length: Depending on the size of the sensor in your camera body, the same lens can give you multiple perspectives. Full-frame sensors come closest to the size of 35mm film cameras, which is why all focal length is measured against. If you have a smaller sensor like APS-C or smaller, then you need to keep in mind the crop factor. As a rule of thumb, Canon APS-C have a 1.6x crop factor and Nikon is 1.5x, Micro-four thirds is 2x, while 1-inch is around 2.7x.
For example, a 35mm lens on a full-frame camera will translate to a 35mm focal length, but the same lens on a cropped sensor camera like a Canon APS-C will result in an equivalent 56mm focal length (35×1.6). This means you’ll get a more zoomed-in view of your subject on a cropped sensor vs. a full-frame.
Lens stabilisation: Most lenses have built-in stabilisation which can be toggled on or off via a switch on the side. There are some that lack built-in stabilisation though, so keep this in mind. Having built-in stabilisation means you can get more blur-free shots at lower shutter speeds even when using the camera handheld. If you’ll have the camera on a tripod most of the time, then this shouldn’t be a factor.
Aperture: It’s important to try and buy a lens with a wide aperture as that ensures better exposure, more depth in your photos, and generally sharper details. Aperture is also known as the f-stop and is denoted by f/2 or f/1.8. The smaller the number, the wider is the opening for the lens to take in more light, while a larger number denotes a narrower opening which means less light enters the lens. Apertures generally narrow as you go up in focal length. You can have a long focal length with a wide aperture or a constant aperture across the zoom range, but such lenses tend to be very expensive.
Weight: This is another important factor to consider. If you travel a lot with your gear, it’s good to have a lens that’s portable and easy to manage in a backpack.
Essential lenses that are worth owning
Your DSLR or mirrorless camera probably came with a basic lens, often called a “kit lens.” This is good enough to get you started with a decent level of zoom, and it should be small and light enough to always keep it attached to your camera body. Once you’re familiar with your camera body though, you’ll want to really stretch its legs a bit, and a speedy prime lens is the first, second lens you should consider.
Prime lens
Prime lenses are essentially lenses that have fixed focal length or no zoom function. 35mm and 50mm are the most popular focal lengths for prime lenses, and these aren’t very expensive either. No matter your camera body, you should easily find a first-party prime lens for your camera body.
Prime lenses are great for portrait photography as they generally have wide apertures which offer a nice and creamy bokeh (the background blur behind your subject), and focus is very quick. They are also great for low-light photography as they can capture a good amount of light, which means you can get away with using a low ISO and shutter speed for less noise in nighttime shots. The obvious disadvantage is that you need to move around to get your framing the way you want it, since you can’t zoom in or out.
Macro lens
Macro photography can be a really fun pursuit and camera makers have dedicated lenses for this branch of photography. As the name suggests, these lenses help you get extremely close-up details of your subject like insects or water droplets. It’s able to achieve this due to the incredibly short focusing distances and a 1:1 image reproduction on the sensor. An ideal macro lens will have a fixed focal length of more than 40mm and a wide aperture. You can get lenses with a bit of zoom, but those aren’t true macro lenses.
Depending on what you’ll be photographing, you can decide to pick the equivalent focal length. For example, a 100mm macro lens will let you get extreme close-up shots for a fair bit of distance, which can be critical if you’re shooting live subjects like small animals or insects. Shorter focal length macro lenses are also great for portrait photography as it allows you to capture really high levels of details like human eyes and hair follicles.
Specialised telephoto lens
Regular zoom lenses are good enough for basic use, but for specialised shooting like live sports, events, or wildlife photography demands a specialised zoom lens. Something with a good zoom range of 300mm is a good place to start. You get telephoto prime lenses too with a fixed focal length. High-zoom lenses usually have a much longer minimum focusing distance of say 70mm or 100mm, and extend up to 400mm, 600mm, etc, depending on how much you’re willing to spend. These lenses are generally massive and will require specialised bags for transporting them. But if you’re looking to get serious with sports or wildlife photography, a quality telephoto lens is indispensable.