must have lenses

[private]

Look at the 50mm thread on flickr and you will get an idea of what this little lens can do - for a $100 its a MUST have!

[Mr Guy]

I personally think the kit lens is a must have, for one real good reason. It's a quality lens with very known limitations. Like everyone else said, if you keep to the kit lens now, you'll eventually be able to finish this sentence:

"D@*(&@# IT, that shot would have been AMAZING if I could have __________________"

When you finish that sentence the same way enough times, it's time to break out the checkbook. Not before!

Sometimes, you'll think a lens is the answer when technique turns out to be, or a flash.

Actually, for me, VERY often a flash. Or a second flash. Or a third flash and a reflector.

[ntinlizi]

Originally Posted by inkista

Agreed. What other people are using isn't necessarily a great guide. This is more like clothes shopping--what fits or works for someone else may not fit or work for you. You're looking for the best fit for what and how you shoot.

For example, the second lens I bought was an 8mm circular fisheye, because I was fascinated with spherical panorama shooting. This is NOT a lens most other shooters would have/want/need in their lineups at all, let alone get as their second lens. But it was perfect for me and it never leaves my bag.

You have to work out what you want from a lens and how much you're willing to pay for it.

This is a good basic guide on lens features and why you might want them.

I'm with everyone else in saying, if you don't know what you want, then wait until you do. Also realize that the lenses you have are perfectly fine. Getting "better" lenses may not actually improve your photos any if you haven't yet learned how to get the best out of them and how much light they need. Stopping down to f/8 goes a long way for sharpness. Good handholding technique or a tripod (or just paying attention to your shutter speed) goes a long way to eliminating motion blur. Mastering your autofocus system and learning to use a single focus point and help with sharpness. Post-processing can do wonders with contrast, saturation, and sharpness.

Try seeing how far technique gets you before going to the glass. You really only want to go to the gear when technique fails you and isn't going to get you what you want.

this is why i kept asking in "general" what others are using. i was curious as to what everyone has and what they used it for to help me better get an idea on what is out there and how others use them. didnt exactly get the responces i was looking for, maybe i should have worded it differently!?! the "find your focal length" was exactly what i was looking for though. thanks

[sk66]

Well, I would say the most "common" and most "versatile" lens that most photographers have/ use is a mid range zoom. Almost everyone has/uses one. From the newbie who got it as a "kit lens" to the seasoned professional. The pro's lens probably cost a lot more than the kit lens, but it doesn't do a lot more a lot better.

The lens I have on my camera the most is a Sigma EX 18-200 OS. It has it's compromises, but it's versatility make it quite valuable/useful to me. You have that fairly well covered with your 55-250. If I wanted "better" I'd get something quite similar, but faster/sharper.

I see a lot of talk about "nifty fifty's"... Mostly because it's a wide aperture prime which is inexpensive and now it has some kind of "mystique" to it. It has it's "pluses"; it's fast, it's sharp, it's manual so you'll have to learn how all of the settings interact. However, I don't have one, and I don't want one.
I think a lot of the fanfare is due to the excitement the idea of getting a "fast prime" generates for the buyer. They then go and take a bunch of pictures with it and in the process learn a lot. In many cases the improvement in pictures (if any) is erroneously attributed to the lens, when it really should be attributed to the practice and the gained knowledge/skill.

[Quo Fan]

I have 3 lenses that are always in my bag. A Canon 50mm f1.8, a Canon 100-400 f4-5.6L, and a Tamron 28-300 f3.5-5.6 MACRO.

I do a fair bit of sports photography, so I need the big long lens. I also like macro, so I got a macro lens.

Your mileage may vary.

[ntinlizi]

good advice everybody, thanks.

[Murtasma]

Leica 50mm f/1.0 Noctilux-M Manual Focus Lens Nuff Said.

[christianyanchula]

For Canon people I think I own two of the must have lenses. The Canon EF 24-70mm f/2.8L USM and the Canon EF 70-200mm f/2.8L IS USM. I know Nikon makes them in the same flavor. I put a lot of thought into what I wanted. In my thought also was that I will be buying a 5DmkII in 2010, so I needed lenses that would work well on that. I will save longer to buy a lens I can use for a long time.

[daft_biker]

Sod the general purpose zooms...got one with my camera and it works ok. Job done

The only lenses I've bought seperately have been with a specific job in mind...in the order I got 'em....

Canon 50mm f/1.4 USM - bought as a high quality standard lens for full frame and a fast lens for biking shots.
Kenko extension tubes - turns the 50mm into a macro lens.
Canon 100mm f/2.8 USM macro - even better for macro than the 50mm+tubes and I was really enjoying macro by this point.
Canon 24mm f/2.8 - for landscapes mostly.
Canon MP-E 65mm 1-5x macro - the best true macro lens money can buy? There's certainly not one I know about and would rather have

I had a good few years of shooting on a kit lens before knowing what other lenses I needed and why...take your time and enjoy it

[inkista]

The most common lenses everyone tends to get are:

1) a walkaround zoom

This is a wide-to-normal or normal-to-short telephoto zoom lens that's good for landscape/portrait/snapshot photography. Your basic vacation shooting lens. The main choices you go for here are the focal length range and maximum aperture. If you want to shoot indoors without a flash, you want an f/2.8 zoom. This category of lenses probably has the largest number of choices in any lineup.

2) a portrait lens.

Usually a nifty-fifty, but different folks have different working distances. Typically, though, this will be a 35mm, 50mm, 85mm, or 135mm fast prime lens with a max. aperture of f/2 or larger (smaller f-number. Commonly, f/2, f1.8, f/1.4 or [if you're really really rich and don't mind huge lenses] f/1.2). The wider aperture lets you use the lens in lower light and gives you a narrow DoF with lots of bokeh (out of focus blur) so that you can focus the viewer's attention to a specific spot of the photo with selective focus.

3) a telephoto zoom

Long reach for faraway subjects. The most common telephoto zoom lengths are 70-300 and 70-200. This is useful for sports, wildlife, or just stuff where you have to hang back and can't get closer. Again, your main choices are going to go by focal length and max. aperture. F/2.8 if you want to shoot indoors without a flash, and more commonly f/5.6 at the telephoto end of the zoom if you want a small price tag.

Stabilization is a bigger issue with telephotos because the longer reach magnifies camera shake. The rule of thumb is that you want to shoot with a shutter speed of 1/focal_length or faster. So, with a 70-300 lens @300mm, you want a shutter speed of 1/300s or faster. With f/5.6 as your widest aperture, that probably means outside on a sunny day with an iso of 400 or more. With stabilization you can ease that handholding limit a few stops. But stabilization only helps with camera shake--not with freezing subject motion. If you plan on taking fast-action photography (birds in flight, sports), etc., you may be shooting at 1/focal_length or faster anyway, and stabilization then becomes, well, useless, and max. aperture or a body that offers high iso settings may be more useful.

Some folks will use an f/2.8 zoom for portraits if they have to move around a lot and need the framing flexibility (e.g., shooting weddings). Some wildlife photographers will use supertelephoto primes for image quality (e.g., 400mm, 500mm, or 600mm lenses), but those tend to be more specialized uses than general. Also, some people are willing to compromise image quality and get a superzoom (wide-to-telephoto, like an 18-200 or 18-250) for convenience and lower cost.

Other less common lenses folks like would include:

1). Macro lenses (allow for very close focusing. Usually used for flowers and insects and tabletop items).

2). Ultrawide/wide-angle lenses--mostly for landscape shooting but also useful in small venus and for large groups of people where your ability to run backwards is limited, and you want to grab more of the view.

3). Fisheye lenses--mostly for skateboarding because of the funky distortion, but gives you an extreme funhouse wideangle with barrel distortion. Also useful for scientific work and spherical panos when you need to capture an extremely wide angle of view. The two main kinds of fisheyes are diagonal (where the entire frame is covered) or circular (where the image is a circle within the frame).

4). Tilt-shift lenses--allows lens "movements"; similar to old-style view cameras with bellows. Can be used for perspective correction and DoF manipulation. Mostly used for architectural photography (to straighten out and make lines parallel rather than converging to vanishing points) and product photography (to increase the DoF in macro shots), but increasing being used in making "fake" macro shots, where subjects appear to be small toy models with a very thin DoF.