Zoom lenses: Taking the kind of photographs you want means having the right lenses. By choosing carefully, you can cover almost every shooting possibilities with only a couple of zoom lenses. Zoom lenses offer the great convenience of being able to compose your shot in the viewfinder. This means you have a lot less equipment to carry around with you and you won't have to bother constantly changing lenses, either. Wide-angle lenses and wide-angle zoom lenses present many distinct advantages. They are an obvious benefit when you are shooting in a tight space and can't step back to get more elements in the picture. They also provide a maximum amount of depth-of-field and are good for subjects that require everything from front to back be sharply in focus. Wide-angle and wide-angle zoom lenses also let you explore the strong sense of exaggerating perspective they offer. STANDARD ZOOM LENSES: The standard zoom lens is probably the single most popular lens being used today. The advantages are obvious. With a standard zoom lens, you can quickly shift the angle of view and the amount of magnification. This let you compose in the viewfinder and try out various alternatives until you decide which you like best. Moreover, with a standard zoom lens, you usually have three or four most commonly used focal lengths - wide-angle, normal and short telephoto - always available. This means you can go out carrying only one lens instead of three - a real weight saving you'll soon learn to appreciate when you're out there in the fields or exploring city streets. TELEPHOTO ZOOM LENSES: Telephoto lenses are essential for sports and nature photography. Photographing wildlife, for instance, almost always requires shooting with a telephoto lens. In fact, any time when you can't physically get close enough to your subject, a telephoto lens is the obvious choice. Short telephoto lenses also make good portrait lenses because the resultant perspective is flattering and you can stand back so your subject wonít become too tense. Telephoto lenses can be heavy, too, so a zoom telephoto lenses is a good choice since it coverts a wide range of shooting uses. FISHEYE AND SUPER WIDE-ANGLE LENSES: Extreme wide-angle lenses are useful for shooting in a tight space but they also provide unusual properties that are interesting to explore. Depth-of-field is almost infinite, for one thing but distortion can be a problem with fisheye lenses because the edges of the frame seem curved. Learning how to compensate for this -- and even take advantage of it and make the quality itself a part of your composition -- is the best way to deal with it. Fisheye lenses also offer an extreme sense of perspective distortion that can result in intriguing images. MACRO LENSES: Macro lenses are designed specially for macro photography. But they can also be used for general photography. The optical elements used in Macro lenses are almost flat, spherical types, ensuring images with higher definition when shooting close-up photos over that of conventional lenses. What type of photography is classified as macro photography? Any subjects where the image size ranges from 1:2 to 3x life-size are defined as macro photography. Anything higher than 3x is known as photomicrography. Life-size (1x) means that the size of the subject in the 35mm frame is the same size in real life. A 2x magnification means the image on film is twice the size of the actual subject while a 0.5x life-size (1:2) means the image recorded is half the size of the actual subject. Canon offers three high-performance macro lenses for extreme close-up shooting. They are the Compact EF 50mm f/2.5, EF 100mm f/2.8 and the EF 180mm f/3.5L USM. The 50mm lens focuses down to 1:2 life-size image on its own. When combined with the Life-size Converter EF, close-up shooting is possible from 0.26x to 1x. Both the 100mm and 180mm lenses can focuses down to 1:1 (1x) magnifications without the need of a converter. The 180mm lens can also be used with Extender EF 1.4x and 2x to achieve magnification ratios of 1.4x and 2x respectively. Over the next page is a gallery of thumbnail pictures. Surfers of this website can click into them to see the larger images that were taken with the various EF lenses showing how subjects can be turned into dramatic images with a little imagination, taking into considerations the fundamentals of photography and the three questions. I will leave it to the enthusiasts to guess what type of focal lengths (fisheyes, wide-angles, macros or telephotos) that were used to create these photos. << Back to Main . 1 . 2 . 3 . 4 . 5 . 6 . 7 . 8 . 9 .