Wide, Zoom or Telephoto?
Let’s go over what your first lens should be and what your lens buying roadmap should look like after that.
We discuss three main lenses in this video, cheap 50mm, Rokinon 14mm, and a 70-200mm. Which one do we recommend first?
The 50mm – Your First Prime Lens
Great starting lens. Screw the kit lens and just buy the camera body. Trust us you’ll thanks us later. At the same time you buy your first camera you should buy a branded 50mm 1.8 lenses. They normally cost $100-$150 depending on the brand. That $100 buck will be the best you ever spent. Shooting with a constant aperture lens will help you learn more effectively when shooting in manual mode, not to mention 9 times out of 10 primes are tack sharp and provided those awesome blurry backgrounds that everyone enjoys.
The Wide 14mm – You Need More Room
After you have spent your time learning how your camera and lens work together and have learned the exposure triangle you’ll find yourself craving a different focal length. We normally recommend when buying a new lens to look for a drastic difference in focal length unless you plan on replacing a broken or lower quality lens. So that brings us to a wide lens, more specifically a 14mm lens. Now not all wide angle lenses are the same but the one we recommend is an awesome pick. The Rokinon 14mm 2.8 is a godsend! Its wide enough to make really dynamic shots using foreground and background elements but the way the lens handles image distortion is top rate. We not only use it for photography but this episode what shot on the 14mm. Tack sharp super wide the aperture is fast and the is hard to beat. You can find it normally around $300 bucks.
The Telephoto 70-200mm – I Shoot Weddings
By this time in your video/photography journey, you will have been taking your camera everywhere, you shoot senior portraits of local high school students, not to mention that you are always invited to family events as the designated photographer/videographer. You’ve been saving that extra cash so you can buy more gear and start your wedding photography/video business. How do we know this? Because everyone goes through this phase. So looking at your list of gear to buy you see SD cards, pelican cases, gimbals, flashes, and at the tip top is the $2,499.99 70-200mm 2.8 lenses. This is a great versatile lens but it is also somewhat of a specialty lens. We always recommend getting this lens last not just because of the cost but because by the time you’re looking to make this purchase you would have had a couple of months or even a year or two to really learn how to use your camera. Now don’t get us wrong we love our 70-200 but, in the end, it’s not the end all be all, we can not stress that enough.
Bonus Lens – 24-70 2.8 Underrated King!
We are a run and gun company and because of that, we don’t always want to fiddle with switching lines because we could miss a valuable shot. What that means is, having a lens that can be both a wide and a telephoto is a miracle. Reducing the amount of time switching lenses and cutting down the risk of missing shots is the 24-70, The 24-70 is an all-around workhorse and if you have the money to get it we recommend picking it up asap. Youll thank us later.
