A few years back I decided to take a moment to put into words which focal lengths and features of lenses were most appealing to me rather than dive straight in with a new lens purchase.
This is my thought process, I hope you find it interesting.
I traded in my two old Canon crop lenses to upgrade the camera body. That meant I immediately started looking at the best lens(es) to fit my needs/wants. Over the years I have found I favour smaller lenses and those that are wider. The lens I missed using the most is a wide angle one and so I started to work out what lens I want and what price I’m willing to pay.
I was shooting with a small 35mm prime (f/2.8) that hides on the front of my full frame camera, an 85mm (f/1.8) that is noticeably larger and an old 10-22mm wide angle lens designed for a camera with a much smaller sensor. The 10-22mm is by far my largest lens, is also the slowest at f/3.5-5.6 and I had to decide whether to reduce my sensor size and the number of megapixels or leave myself with comedy vignetting to deal with. The vignetting is really just forced cropping from the design of the lens. Sticking a lens not designed for that camera requires a convertor and my converter is a little on the budget side so the auto focus performance takes a significant hit. It’s not that it’s a bad lens, quite the opposite, but it feels like a lens that just doesn’t fit my setup.
Back then my most challenging photography came a couple of times a year back stage at London Fashion Week (LFW) where the widest aperture gets the best chance at shots where I can’t guarantee how good or bad the lighting will be. Honestly, you can’t imagine how back stage and first look areas can be. Other times we could be out in the bright sunshine in near perfect conditions.
Fast lenses might be king, but a nice compact zoom lens has to be the second best feature that would help at both LFW and in getting closer to the action at Goodwood motor sport meetings where that zoom would allow me to point at the track or at something right next to me without having to change the lens. Aperture is not quite as important for Goodwood and an f/4 would probably be ideal.
Prime lenses are brilliant to use and generally excellent quality but sticking a zoom on the front of my camera is a compromise of a different kind. Would I want it to be a useful travel zoom, 24-70mm for instance or 70-200mm for real close up work?
So my choices were: stick with two primes and cope, pick up a third prime and switch lenses more often, or find a suitably fast zoom that will do it all.
So with that in mind what were the choices?
I found very little that hits the mark. A nice range of 10, 12 or 15mm manual lenses is available but heading back into autofocus territory leaves me looking at expensive Zeiss glass that is 18mm or Sony glass at 20mm.
What do I want in a lens?
Once I paused and took stock it was quite easy to explore what it is I want in the wide lens so that when I select a particular focal length I get the one I will use the most. I also have to consider the auto vs manual focus issue. It’s really only an issue because I try to carry as few lenses as possible so having a two wide lenses would mean I’ll only ever take one or at most two with me and that would definitely be an autofocus lens if I had the choice. Therefore I only want one wide lens - it just has to be the right one.
Where do I use manual focus?
- Close-ups. Product shots or nails for instance. I can never trust autofocus in these instances.
- Landscape pictures when aperture isn’t absolutely wide open or I have a particular focal point I want to draw attention to.
- Low light situations when the autofocus decides to hunt around a bit. This has not been an issue with my latest camera.
Where do I use autofocus?
- Everywhere else.
- People and fast changing emotions, poses.
- Cars, motorsport and moving vehicles
- Landscape pictures most of the time.
- Street photos - I just can’t focus quickly unless I use the old prefocus for a specific distance trick.
Where do I want to use a wide lens?
- Landscape - wide outdoors shots
- Architecture - inside and out of interesting buildings, shapes and structures
- Anywhere I can use the wide angle distortion to make a subject stand out
- Crowds - anywhere there is a lot going on and I don’t want to use a stitched together panoramic image.
What about lens characteristics?
I remember when I got my 10-22mm lens in my late 20s and it transformed my photography. A little like the person who buys a fisheye lens and then uses it for everything, I found it on the front of my camera more than any other lens I owned. Despite me taking some truly rubbish shots it did help me to develop something of my own style. It got me moving my feet more and playing with the position of the main subject. When you play with reasonably wide lenses you generally find the edge of the image distorts more than the centre but that the nearer you get to your subject the more you can cause comedy distortion. On top of this by taking shots from above or low down it is possible to throw the whole scene into cartoon proportions.
I don’t especially want the comedy proportions or ultra wide architectural flexibility and although I would love to try my hand at some astrophotography I won’t make that a driver towards my decision.
So another thing to consider…
Focal length doesn’t just alter how much can fit into a single frame but it can change the emotional attachment a viewer has to the picture they are looking at.
Great pictures are said to show a scene in a way that is different from the way the human eye sees it.
Wide angle lenses exaggerate the perception of depth. Yet when used close up they give a viewer a unique look at the subject, exaggerating the importance of that subject by making it look different to how it would with the naked eye. How different depends on the width of the lens, the angle of shot and how close to the subject you are. You still have the normal compositional control along with lighting and contrast to play with on top of these additional tools.
If we take an image with many layers, each layer being a significant distance from one another such as a person standing at the front, a hedge a little way back before reaching a house and then a hill towards the back of the picture before the sky fills in the rest of the image. With a medium wide angle lens subjects appear isolated from the background with movements towards the camera exaggerating this separation. With a very wide angle extreme exaggeration of this separation is possible. Ultimately each of the layers feels further apart from one another, more separate and therefore the feeling of distance between each layer is increased letting the viewer become directly involved with the subject and feel there is less ‘clutter’ detracting from the main focus.
Depending on the level of distortion the viewer will feel close or even too close to the subject and exaggerate the psychological connection they have to the subject. Perhaps it will even make us feel like we are intruding into the person’s world.
What about telephoto lenses?
I only have an 85mm lens which some wouldn’t even class as a telephoto. However, even at this focal length the lens is exhibiting the behaviour of shrinking the distance between objects.
Although they do help get you shots from further away - perhaps where the subject would change their behaviour if you were nearer or it’s at an event where you cannot get closer - telephoto lenses are better used to flatten images and flatter the human form by avoiding accentuation or distortion. A portrait taken with something between an 85mm and a 105mm will just look so much better than with a wide lens. But, you have to be far enough away because generally these lenses need more distance before they will focus.
If you want your person to look in proportion to the scenery around them then us a telephoto lens, get a bit further back and use this to capture both the person and the background. It will provide a much better representation of scale than using a wide angle lens.
I keep experimenting and it is surprising how much better a photo looks just taken with a lens in a different category.
On a full frame 35mm sensor:
- <18mm - extreme wide angle or fisheye lenses - architecture - lots of distortion depending on the shot taken
- 18-20mm - Very wide. Beginning to distort but without getting silly about things
- 21mm-24mm - wide but avoids distortion
- 25 - 35mm - wide angle - single subject provides space and a portrait like view of the subject
- 35 - 70mm - normal - often called standard lenses, especially 35mm, is known to reproduce a similar view to that of the human eye. Not the entirety of the view we can see at any one time but the area we can actually focus on and process.
- 70 - 135mm - medium telephoto lenses are used to flatten the perception of depth in an image but more importantly there is a psychological factor involved. We are used to seeing the subjects of telephoto images as things that normally appear far away to us. For example, wildlife, celebrities or sports persons mid flow. This adds formality and distance to the image by isolating them with the long lens.
- 135mm - 300+mm - telephoto
So focal length changes the dynamic of the image and not just what you can fit in to the picture. The lens choice helps you tell you story and get across specific ideas about your subject and their importance within the frame.
Having looked through photos I have taken in the past and playing with a few lenses in the local camera shop I have identified a couple of important points.
So, how wide is wide enough?
- 24mm is a bit normal.
- 16mm is a bit cartoonish.
- 20mm looks to be the sweet spot.
For zooms the problems are even greater when looking at the cost and weight of best in class lenses.
The Sony FE 24-105mm zoom would be amazing if I didn’t need to to be faster than f/4. The Sony 24-70mm G is on the pricey side as this isn’t my full time job. The Tamron 28-75mm is a bit heavy and I wish it were wider. The Sigma 24-70 is a tank - I don’t think I would enjoy the weight. The newest lens - Samyang 24-70mm f/2.8 - is not yet available in the UK but looks like it might just do the trick. And so to wait.
Lens shortlist:
- 20mm Sony f/1.8 G auto focus - £700
- 24mm-70mm Samyang f/2.8 parfocal (big -1096g) - £825
- Sigma Art 24-70mm f2.8 DG DN (835g) - £1175
- Sony FE 24-70mm F2.8 GM (886g) - £1900
Update Jan 2026
I ended up with two lenses. The 20mm Sony prime, from the list above, and I grabbed the superb Viltrox 28mm F/4.5 FE fixed focal length pancake lens.
Both lenses are superb but in very different ways. The Viltrox is tiny, lives on the front of my camera in place of a lens cap, takes characterful pictures and cost me £65 (current price £90).
On the down side, it doesn’t like bright (direct) light because you can’t stop it down enough and you need a really steady hand in gloomier places. But I just switch out for my 35mm if conditions are tough for the little pancake.
Oh, and I now have a full frame camera that literally fits in a coat pocket. Love it.
The 20mm is super fast, great in all conditions and gives me that ‘look’ I wanted. But the irony? I hardly use the 20mm. I think it is more to do with the type of travel I have been doing rather than the lens. Time will tell.
What’s next?
I would like something in the telephoto range for motorsport and kids sport and mine get older. But, the iPhone keeps getting better and keeps adding more lens and optical zoom options. Easier and better for kids sport and I don’t need to be ‘that dad’ with the camera bag and big lens. In my heart, I simply don’t want to walk around with a camera the size of a small cannon in my hands.
And as for motorsport, I might go back to exploring hire options for those events.Or stick to the areas of the track that I can get close enough from my 85mm to do the business and I’m lucky enough that that isn’t a huge problem.
For street photography I really fancy something in the neutral 40-50 range. Sony have the amazingly small G series that includes a 40mm f2.5. That would be another great walk about lens.
I’ll give it some more thought. Perhaps keep an eye on an update in a few years. But for now, I’ll focus on getting back out and taking pictures with whatever I have with me.