Lenses: The Most Important Piece of Gear in Creating Amazing Photographs
We often find ourselves wishing and talking about DSLR cameras, we compare them and adopt a geek language babbling about shutter speeds, ISO, camera features, image processing and other technicalities. This makes us forget about the most important piece of gear that helps us take the photograph we want, and that is the LENS.
The lens is the eye of the camera, and every photograph is recorded after the light come through the lens. Taking your DSLR without putting your lens on, and start taking photos, your see that the image processor records and extremely blurry photographs.
Lenses allows us to:
- get more light ( lenses with big aperture), even if your camera have high iso numbers, you’ll still need a fast lens to get fast shutter speeds.
- get close-up of your subject without actually being close ( telephoto lenses )
- get incredibly sharp photographs
- get sharp images of a mosquito’s eye ( macro lenses )
- isolate our subject with small depth of field
- capture sharp images of huge mountains and big fields of flowers ( wide lenses )
- make creative photographs with lens-baby
As you can see lenses are way more important that the camera.
In creating the ultimate lens is involved a lot of precision mechanics and optics science. Also there is use a high amount of very expensive glass materials, so you will need a lot of glass elements in building a zoom lens with fast aperture. Also every piece of glass is treated with other substances for durability, minimize chromatic aberrations, reduce flare, etc. Also raw optical glass costs around 1000$ per kilogram, as Discovery Channel points out in their “How it’s made” show.
All of this being said, you can easily explain why a good lens costs hundreds and even thousand of dollars.
Also please check this video created by Discovery Channel on how lenses are made.
Damn right are important.
Nice article.
Thank you