MALA-RISE IMAGES Photography by George Hopkins

Todays photographers and the consumer market have many choices of equipment to cover the interests and preferences be it Architecture, Landscapes, Macro. Portrait or Wildlife. From Super Zooms offering 18 x magnification to the Professional Primes costing many thousand pounds.

This article is perhaps aimed at image quality first within a reasonable budget avoiding the extremes of trying to cover the range of 10 -600mm in 2 easy superzooms or a vast amount of very expensive prime lenses.

Assuming our photographer covers all the interest of vast areas of landscape to the distance grabbing wildlife our lens choice will be 4 lenses with a limitation zoom of 4 x taking into account full and 1.6 sensors.

Our choice for both full frame and 1.6 crop Sensors.

Full frame...........12 - 24mm, 24 - 70mm, 70 - 200mm, 100 - 400mm

1.6 crop..............10 - 22mm, 18 - 55/70mm, 70 - 200mm, 100 - 400mm

Camera Branded or 3rd Party Lenses:

The big three of Canon, Nikon and Pentax have there own criteria on how there sensors react to light and branded lenses quite often are matched to these sensors, colour rendition etc. 3rd party lenses are much better these days as the likes of Sigma, Tamron and Tokina development on varying sensors are almost matching the camera brand manufacturer.

This gives the photographer more choice in his equipment at reduced costs especially in the wide angle and medium telephoto zoom areas. Also do we really need those fast lenses costing thousands of pounds when for one F stop you can get that lens within your budget. Sometimes a £100 tripod can get you that extra F stop at a fraction of the cost.

Still Under Construction: