"What lens should I buy?" is one of the most common gear questions with beginner and advanced amateur photographers alike, and most approaches may lead you in the wrong direction. You do research, spin your head over dizzying options, and then ask people on forums which is best for you. My advice: take marketing out of the equation and be honest about what you can achieve with a piece of gear and why you need it.
Vision
The most important criteria in lens selection is the story you want to tell. A lens determines how you see through the camera, and it gives each image character, such as perspective, angle of view, and bokeh, or out-of-focus elements in the background. You can use a lens skillfully to serve certain looks, or you can waste its potential on generic shots or purposes that don't make use of its full potential.
Secondly, you should have the skill to get out of the lens everything it's capable of providing. If you buy a lens for sharpness or clarity and then frame up poor light, poor exposure and don't know good focusing technique or composition, you've just wasted your money on a piece of gear you can't control.
Storytelling characteristics
Telephotos, usually 100 mm and longer, compress scenes, enable you to magnify subjects more, help isolate subjects from backgrounds by throwing the background out of focus and compress foreground and background. Fast telephotos feature wide apertures of 2.8 and sometimes f/2. Long lenses enable you to crop scenes and control backgrounds.
Wide lenses, about 35 mm or less, exaggerate space around the subject and tend to distort features. Their wide perspective creates the illusion of greater depth of field, or distance between the nearest and farthest subjects in good focus. They pack a lot of information into the frame, but if not used carefully it can be too much. Wide lenses are often used to feature environments and emphasize space, but not necessarily dimension.
Medium zooms cover the average range of zoom, about 35 mm to 100 mm, and give different looks depending on how far you zoom. Their flexibility enables you to shoot different situations from environments to closeups without constantly changing lenses, but they often lack the wider apertures of dedicated telephotos or primes, and the maximum aperture usually varies throughout the zoom range, making any manual exposure a bit of a trick.
Prime lenses have no zoom and give you a consistent look and feel, often used for portraits or environmental shots. They often have wide maximum apertures, from 2.8 down to 1.2, helping you defocus backgrounds for separation even when the subject is fairly close to them. Primes vary in focal lengths from wide to telephoto and are often prized for their fast apertures, consistent looks and clarity.
Specialty lenses include perspective control lenses and fisheyes, which correct perspective distortion and exaggerate distortion, respectively. Macros are also in this category, and they're kind of like microscopes, enabling you to fill the frame with tiny subjects. So, the first consideration is which lens you need to tell your story. It could be the cheapest kit lens available, or your skill might demand better optics or different focal lengths. If you're honest about your needs and separate them from wants, you can be very selective in what lenses you shop for. This enables you to develop a budget, which is the next criteria.
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