Which LENSES you should BUY!

hello everybody I hope you're a well now I know that none of you ever watched these videos for production values but nevertheless I feel the need to apologize today because I'm gonna have to do the entirety of this video kneeling down because I've broken my Deskjet no idea how to fix it either but there's someone come in to fix the dishwasher in a couple of hours time because that's broken as well and hopefully he'll be able to sort it I mean I imagine dishwashers and desk chairs of maybe the same skill set also what you reckon big hand or small coffee is actually really uncomfortable anyway this video is sponsored by lumix and these are all my lumix lenses which I love they're like my little it's gonna say babies but I submit odd so they're not like my babies nevertheless these are the lenses that I use to do my job and make my videos and I thought I'd go through the process today of what I've learned over the years from buying lenses because if you've tried to do it before you might have noticed that I mean you start off really really excited yeah and then you kind of a bit less excited and then a bit less excited than that and then a little bit less excited than that and then you start you start stressing a little bit and then you get really stressed then you panic and then you start crying at least in my experience and you know it should be a joyous thing buying something like a new lens but it's not all the time because lenses are very difficult things to buy and that's because they don't really exist on their own you know you don't buy a lens to use on its own you buy it to use with a work camera for a start but also to use with your other lenses and to find something that kind of fits and complements or your other lenses and your cameras and just your kit overall and to work out amount of money to spend on it that represents good value and to work out how much you're going to use it to look at all the reviews and the test shots and the graphs and the stats and all that kind of stuff and after a while it gets a bit daunting I find so yeah I thought I'd just share some some little nuggets that I've picked up over the years or considerations if you will but I like to employ when I'm trying to work out if I should buy a new lens or not so that's what this video is now the first thing to say about lens is is that you may have come across the concept of good fast and cheap pick two now this works for loads of lines of stuff but it works particularly well for lenses because fast can mean wide aperture which fits quite nicely into this thing so if you've not come across this concept before basically you have to pick between fast good and cheap and you can only ever have to so if you have a good fast lens then it won't be cheap and if you have a good cheap lens then it won't be fast and if you have a cheap fast lens then it won't be good and that rule applies most of the time I found and when I started out in photography that was pretty much my entire framework for trying to work out if a lens was good value and therefore if I should buy or not in the years since then I've kind of learned a few other things that I should take into consideration and yeah I'll run through them now starting with weight now if you followed this channel for a while you'll know that I bang on about weight all the time but if you're a photographer like me weight is a big big deal because I tend to go out mountains in through forests and kind of walk around all day with everything that I have with me on my back so in order to kind of come back with working shoulders I have to limit the amount of stuff I take all the the weight of the stuff that I take and given that I do photo and video typically I have two camera bodies a G 85 and a g9 these six lenses are the 16 you know I have these six and the wide-angle lens I'm filming this on so seven lenses drone of see loads of batteries are drunk controller water food extra layers tripod recruiting lis filters Maps probably other things I'm forgetting but a lot of stuff microphones microphones and that means that you come to a point way it's just too heavy and you start taking stuff at the back which is something like absolutely used to do so I'd spend loads of money on expensive lenses only to find that a couple of months after buying them I'd start kind of taking them out my bag before I left the house and leaving one the kitchen table which is well I mean that just means you've got loads of expensive glass that you're not utilizing sell any kitchen table obviously so my suggestion here is simple basically everybody when it comes to lenses and all kinds of camera equipment everybody has a financial budget my suggestion to you is that you have a weight budget as well which is something that I think people are becoming less and less aware of because more and more people are buying online so lenses are very tactile things they're made to be held they're made to be carried places typically they're made to go on the front of your camera and to be kind of supported by a hand they're basically made to be touched and more and more people are buying lenses without ever going through that process because they don't go into a shop and have a feel of the lens and and get a sense of how big it is and how much it weighs not my kind of stuff which means that people buy lenses now me included sometimes not really knowing what it's actually like in real life and how much it weighs and if you don't have a sense of how much you're willing to carry in terms of weight for a typical photo trip whatever that is for you then that could lead to doing what I used to do which is kind of slowly removing stuff and just not using it convincing yourself that you don't need to use that particular lens on that particular day which is just pointless so yeah having a white budget try work out what you're happy to carry if your typical trips is is a good start because that gives you basically a yeah a white budget as I said so you'll be able to work out what you can afford in terms of weight when you're looking for for new lenses or you might decide that you have to get rid of old on sore or something else tripod maybe [Music] consideration number two is versatility so this little 42.5 lens for example is a brilliant little portrait lens it's got a full-frame equivalent focal length of 85 so perfect for portraits and stuff to clean low light because it's at 1.7 but it also focuses really really closely which means that I can use it for detail shots I mean it's not a full-on macro lens but it's good at doing that kind of stuff all of which means that this is multi-talented this has two uses for me at least and anytime you can find that in a lens that's absolutely gold because ultimately that saves me carrying like a potentially a macro lens around with me and spending money on a macro lens so perfect now the important thing with versatility is that versatility is very much personal it depends all on you so for example this is my 12 to 35 so in full-frame equivalent is 24 to 70 so pretty much as boring as lenses come really in terms of folklore engine and what it can do but an absolute workhorse and essential to professional photographers now this is versatile to me because it has a constant aperture of 2.8 so right the way through the focal range I can keep this at 2.9 so a family low-light or I want a a relatively shallow depth of field this is gold to me and this spells versatility for other people though it might not serve other people this lens might be more versatile cuz this is a 12 to 60 so this has nearly double the focal range but it's not constant aperture which means that if you zoom in the widest aperture closes which is not great for video and not great if you want to maintain a shallow depth of field so to me the shorter focal length is more versatile than the one with a greater focal range and yeah to other people that might be different so it's important to understand your shooting needs before you before you try and kind of gauge versatility based on other reviews and stuff Harmony's are hurt [Music] consideration number three is the point of diminishing returns which I've spoken about on this channel before so let's say for example you spend five hundred pounds on our lens chances are you're gonna get quite a good lens if you were then to buy a lens that was a thousand pounds you would end up probably all things being equal with a lens that was better in some way than the 500 pound lens however the chances of that lens being twice as good I would say a slim but suggests the probability is that the second 500 pounds of the thousand pounds you're getting less bang for your buck and that's the point of diminishing returns as you spend more and more money you get less for each pound or dollar so lumix for example make 225 millimeter lenses so fifty millimeter equivalent in for frame they make this which is the twenty five one for collaboration with Leica and they also make a 25 millimeter 1.7 now I use this focal range a lot I use it for stills and for video extensively which means that I decided that for my uses it was worth what spend more money get a slightly heavier lens and get the one for however this 42.5 this is also one of two lenses that lumix make at this focal length and I decided to go for the cheaper one so this is the 1/7 there is also a 1/2 which is much bigger heavier and more expensive and the reason I decided to go for this one is that I don't shoot at this focal length all that often and so for me it wasn't worth the extra expense in the extra weight and also had I had the 1.2 in my bag the heavy 1.2 let's say it's this size it's been a while since I've seen one but it might not be but I might decide it because I don't shoot at that focal length all that much that if I don't think I'm gonna see anything on a shoot that requires it then I just leave it at home with this I don't have to do that because I mean look at it it's it's really not a white penalty which means that if I come across something that this lens is perfect for I have it if I had the 1.2 I wouldn't see yeah that's a big consideration to point of diminishing returns how much do you actually need um other stuff yes real-world tests in my experience it's much better to value real-world tests versus the kind of tests that having little ups and show you graphs and things of distortion and corner softness and all that kind of stuff I much prefer to see actual photos demonstrating the strengths and weaknesses of a lens because I find it much easier to try and work out how that will play out in my own work so for example if you've got a lens that's rated is quite soft in the corners when you've got really wide apertures if you can actually see the examples of that then you can work out that typically you're never already gonna have subjects in your photos right in the corner so you might decide it doesn't matter similarly if you see examples of distortion you might decide that that's no big deal for you because you rarely shoot in places with straight lines for example and when I first started buying lenses I paid too much attention to the lab tests that showed kind of the graphs of things like distortion as I said and it would discourage me from buying lenses that wordperfect which meant I spent far too much money and far too much time procrastinating and saving up basically the lenses that I actually didn't really need I could have just got the cheaper options because in reality for my style of work they would have been fine so yeah real-world tests and looking at actual images is a much better thing to do I think they're looking at graphs so you can do that on all kinds of websites places like Flickr often have groups for particular lenses or even lots of kind of blogs and review places now they'll show you pictures and even comparisons against other lenses and personally certainly in my experience that's much more useful than graphs porn sitter ation number five is build quality now you have to consider I guess to some extent how clumsy you are and where you live yeah I'd suggest for example I am incredibly clumsy and therefore I'm prone to dropping things and throwing things into my bag when I should probably place them into my bag now these lenses pretty much all the lenses that I have a super rugged particularly zooms there are also weather sealed which is crucial if you live any otherwise you can end up missing shots and panicking when he get drops of water on your lens some of these aren't weather sealed so this 25 this is a few years old now in terms of design I've only just got it myself but it's a few years old and this isn't weather sealed so I'd have to take that into account but having rugged professional build quality you might decide it's not important to you if you're careful and you live in the desert but for me it's a really big deal so it may well be to you it may well be a a thing worth paying more for consideration number six is to buy slowly so it's tempting if you ever end up in a situation where you can do this I mean I never have but I've heard of people that have well you maybe sell all of your gear from one system and want to straightaway invest in another for example or you just come into a load of money and just want to buy a system up from scratch and in that situation I think it'd be tempting to just build your dream list of lenses and go for it straight away just pull the trigger buy all of them immediately and I would advise against doing that because each lens has its own characteristic and you may find when you slowly build up your lens collection but actually you don't need things that you thought you would need so for example if you were moving to micro four-thirds and you had concerns that the shallow depth of field was going to be difficult to achieve and therefore you wanted to get a zoom but you also wanted to get a prime to make sure that you could stop down further then you could with the zoom you may find after time if you were to just get the zooms in the first place that you're actually quite happy with the depth of field in which case you have save yourself the money and the weight and it's not really much weight but you know I mean just example yeah buy things slowly rather than rushing into buying things all at once I'd say one consideration number seven is is the focal lengths themselves so I have a pretty wide range of focal lengths here I mean from my eight to eighteen I've gotten the camera now to my 35 to 100 I can cover 16 to 200 millimeters for frame equivalent which is pretty much all I need if you're unsure what you need then you need to spend more time shooting basically that's the only way to find out if you're missing out on focal a purchase that you think you could benefit from looking at other people's work and trying to work out what kind of focal lens we use for that can be helpful to you again you can do that on places like Flickr 500px or those kinds of sites but yeah shooting more is is a great way to kind of work out what focal lengths you've benefit from most what kind of most of your keepers are shot at and what are the focal lengths you you might need in order to get other kinds of photos that that you think would make your shooting better yeah that's a fairly broad list of considerations to think about when you're buying lenses I can't feel my knees anymore this really hurts I'm gonna have to fix that chair if you can think of any more considerations of things you should think about when you're trying to buy lenses do please leave them in the comments for for other people and myself too to learn from that would be very helpful thank you very much for watching what else is that I think that's it I've got a lot of work to do today I'm going to kneel for all of it this is gonna be hell hmm thank you for watching [Music] [Music]

Channel: James Popsys

Views: 152,645

Rating: 4.9088893 out of 5

Keywords: camera lens, choose lens, pick camera lens, find lenses, photography lenses, prime lens, zoom lens, learn photography, best lenses, canon lenses, nikon lenses, lumix lenses, heavy lenses

Id: ImEFl0wCdQc

Length: 16min 12sec (972 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 03 2019