Old Farmhouse shot with a 70-200mm lens

Prime, zoom, normal, telephoto, wideangle, tilt-shift. These are all commonly heard terms that describe different lenses. Which one is best is determined by a combination of factors including the subject, your vision and creativity, the light, your budget. Remember also that many of the greatest and most famous photographs of all time were taken by photographers who only had one or two fixed focal length lenses to choose from, so just because you don’t have a particular lens there’s no reason to think you can’t still get great photos.

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Note that everything I mention in this post is relative to a standard full-frame / 35mm camera. If you use medium format, the various APS-C crop DSLR’s etc, you’ll need to make the necessary mathematical adjustments appropriate to your gear.

To simplify a bit, an ultrawide is less than 20mm, wide angle is in the range 20-35mm, normal is 50mm, telephoto is greater than 70mm. Primes are fixed focal length lenses whereas zooms offer a range of focal lengths in one lens. Lenses such as tilt-shift (perspective correction), fisheye with their 180 degree field of view and macro with their 1:1 capabilities are often referred to as specialty lenses.

The following table looks at some common photo situations and offers some lens choice suggestions.

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