In order to improve the quality of the photographs that you take with DSLR cameras, it's useful to understand the differences between the types of lenses that you can use to produce various effects. After all, the ability to change lenses is one of the core features which differentiates digital SLR cameras from compact digital cameras.
Normal Zoom Lenses
Don't be misled by the term "normal" because these lenses can actually cover quite wide angles of view when they are zoomed out to the maximum wide angle range of their capacity. Their use can also be extended to cover medium telephoto aspects and they are great for shooting casual shots of familiar things such as landscapes and groups.Being relatively lightweight and compact they are fairly compact, making them great to carry around to capture everyday events and take great vacation photos.
Telephoto Zoom Lenses
A good example of uses for telephoto lenses is if you are at sporting events such as football games and want to capture the action of the pitch when you can't get close. Telephoto lenses have a narrower angle of view than normal zoom lenses, which is also good for cutting out the background from a picture.They are mainly considered to be good for portrait photography because they provide the ability to separate a subject from its background by defocussing the background.
Wide-angle Zoom Lenses
These are great for landscape shots or in tight spaces which don't allow alot of space to move back from the object of focus, wide-angle lenses enable you to capture objects that wouldn't fit into a picture or photo with a normal zoom lens. With wide-angle zoom lenses it is important that you keep the background simple in order to produce some great photographs.
Macro Lenses
Macro lenses enable you to get up close and personal with the object of your focus because they are designed to focus at much closer distances than other lenses. They are great for capturing fine details and are often used in nature photography to capture small insects or details of flowers.
Fisheye Lenses
Good for providing a unique dome-like effect at the edge of photographs, fisheye lenses produce very wide angles of view with unique renderings that heavily distort straight lines.
Tilt-shift Lenses
If you want to maintain your perspective in a photograph, tilt-shift lenses are very specialised lenses that enable the perspective between the lens and the sensor to be adjusted through tilting and shifting. The tilt movement is able to focus on both near and far points with depth or concentrate the focus or just a single point in a picture. The shift movement works by correcting the oblique distortion which is usually seen in photographs in which you are looking up at an object such as a building. Parallel lines are kept parallel instead of the usual oblique effect in which the object of focus would appear to be more narrow towards the top of the shot.
So there you have a breakdown of the different types of lenses you can use in order to get to grips with developing your skills at digital photography using digital SLR cameras.
