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Tuesday, May 5, 2009

Building The Ultimate Lens Kit


There are so many top-notch, high-tech, affordable lenses available for nature photography, it’s easy to assemble a collection that will give you the right tool for what you love to do

By Mike Stensvold
Labels: Lenses

This Article Features Photo Zoom
Prime Or Zoom?
Back in the day, pros used prime (single-focal-length) lenses because zooms back then weren’t very sharp. That has changed today, though, and most of the landscape pros we surveyed use pro zoom lenses. Improvements in optical materials, construction techniques and computer-aided design breakthroughs have made today’s top zoom lenses excellent.

That said, few pros would use the “kit” lenses that are sold with entry-level D-SLRs. These 18-55mm (or thereabouts) $100 wonders are great for D-SLR newbies, but they don’t have the sharpness, distortion and aberration correction, and in the case of longer zooms, AF performance, of the pro zooms.
Pro wildlife photographers still prefer the fast supertelephoto lenses over zooms, in part for their longer focal lengths and in part for their greater speed. The longest focal length available in a current Canon or Nikon zoom lens is 400mm, while the superteles go up to 800mm (Canon) and 600mm (Nikon). And both Canon and Nikon offer 400mm ƒ/2.8 supertelephotos, a stop faster than Nikon’s 200-400mm ƒ/4 supertele zoom and two stops faster than Canon’s 100-400mm ƒ/4.5-5.6 supertele zoom.

Zooms do offer a special advantage to the D-SLR user: fewer lens changes. Each time you change lenses on a D-SLR, dust can enter and settle on the low-pass filter that covers the image sensor. Once there, the dust will appear in every future shot. With zoom lenses, you won’t have to change lenses every time you want to use a new focal length.
lens kit
Pentax DA 300mm
lens kit
Tamron 18-270mm

Resources
Canon
(800) OK-CANON
www.usa.canon.com

Nikon
(800) NIKON-US
www.nikonusa.com

Olympus
(888) 968-4448
www.olympusamerica.com

Panasonic
(800) 211-PANA
www.panasonic.com
 Pentax
(800) 877-0155
www.pentaximaging.com

Pro-Optic (Adorama)
(888) 991-6599
www.adorama.com

Samsung
(800) SAMSUNG
www.samsung.com

Sigma
(800) 896-6858
www.sigma-photo.com
 Sony
(877) 865-SONY
www.sonystyle.com

Tamron USA
(631) 858-8400
www.tamron.com

Tokina (THK Photo Products)
(800) 421-1141
www.thkphoto.com
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