Latest Lenses

The kit lenses you get with DSLRs are good value, but they’re not always terribly good lenses. The problem is, though, that the next step up from the camera maker’s own lens range is a big one. For example, Canon’s EF-S 17-85mm has a list price of £600 and Nikon’s 16-85mm is £550.The Sigma 17-70mm offers a similarly useful step up, but at a much lower cost. The list price is £330, but careful shoppers could almost certainly knock around £80 off thi

By any standards, this Canon EF 24mm f1.4 is a pretty specialised lens. It’s a fixed focal length optic in a camera world now dominated by zooms, and compared to the average zoom it’s also fantastically expensive. But it does have that f1.4 maximum aperture, and this gives it a two-stop aperture advantage over even a fast, pro zoom lens. There are two benefits to this. One is that it enables you to shoot in light that’s much dimmer than usual without risking camera shake (or wi

This is the widest of three new Nikkor ‘PC-E’ or ‘perspective control’ lenses. This 24mm Nikkor acts as a wide-angle on full-frame bodies like the D3, D700 and D3x, and as a 36mm (approximately) on a DX-format Nikon. Perspective control lenses are used widely in architectural photography. This is a discipline which requires perfectly straight lines and certainly not the vertical ‘keystoning’ effect usually seen when shooting tall buildings. Keystoning is caus

We live in the 21st Century, an era of high-tech autofocus zooms, and Olympus comes up with a fixed focal length lens that’s as retro as a bakelite radio. What’s going on? Don’t knock fixed focal length lenses. Zooms may have taken over the world, but so has reality TV and Big Macs. Popularity doesn’t necessarily equate to quality.Zooms may appear to make life simpler, but that doesn’t mean they improve your photography or that they’re nicer to use. Yes, a fi

Lens manufacturers are a bit cheeky about using the word ‘macro’. They use it to describe any kind of close-up photography, whereas the real definition is a lot stricter than that. In fact, a ‘macro’ lens is one that can reproduce an object at its actual size on the film or sensor. It’s this 1:1 reproduction ratio that defines a macro lens, whereas a lot of the time it’s used to describe a close-focusing mode that doesn’t get anywhere near this magnifica

Super wide-angle lenses bring a new dimension to photography. Their practical benefits are obvious: they enable you to shoot architectural shots in confined spaces, for example, and capture broader, wider vistas in landscapes. There’s much more to it than this, though. Super wide-angle lenses introduce extremely strong perspective effects, radically altering the visual relationship between foreground and background objects and offering the potential for some striking visual effects. Even i

The kit lenses you get with digital SLRs are good value, but they’re not always terribly good lenses. The problem is though, that the next step up from the camera maker’s own lens range is a big one. For example, Canon’s EF-S 17-85mm has a list price of £600 and Nikon’ 16-85mm is £550. The Sigma 17-70mm offers a similarly useful step up, but at a much lower cost. The list price is £330, but careful shoppers could almost certainly knock around £80

In the early days of digital SLRs, before the arrival of its smaller-format EF-S lenses, the 17-40mm was one of the mainstays of the Canon range, a super-wideangle zoom for the full-frame EOS 1Ds but also the nearest thing at the time to a ‘standard’ zoom for the newer, smaller-format EOS models like the D60. It’s been around a while, then, but the arrival of cheaper full-frame Canons has made the 17-40mm interesting all over again, especially since the 21-megapixel EOS 5D Mk

The appeal of superzooms is obvious. A single lens like this, which covers a focal range equivalent to 27-300mm, can replace two or even three ordinary zooms. You don’t have to worry about carrying round separate lenses, you don’t have to waste time swapping from one to the other and there’s also less opportunity for dust to get into the camera body and onto the sensor. At the same time, though, superzooms have some significant disadvantages, including price, weight, image sof

Super-wide-angle zooms are difficult to design and for this reason tend to be pretty expensive to buy. And while you can usually expect a price gap between independent lenses and those from the camera maker, here it seems even wider than ever. Let’s say you have a Canon body. This lens will cost you around £400 at current street prices, but Canon’s own EF-S 10-22mm is nearer £650. Or, if you’ve got a Nikon, the nearest equivalent is the new Nikon 10-24mm, which wei