Choosing Canon Camera Zoom Lenses

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If you are planning to buy a digital camera, we wish you good luck choosing, considering the fact that the array of choice is overwhelming. There a literally hundreds of brands and thousands of models available on the market today, it is not too much to say that it is easier to navigate through the jungle of Amazon than to know each camera in details and make comparisons. As for the task of finding the most suitable Canon zoom lenses for your camera, it is even more daunting, but yet possible and fun.

The idea behind choosing Canon zoom lenses is, you own or you want to own a camera with interchangeable lenses, each with its own unique capabilities. People who are not much into photography would tend to shunt away from cameras that require changeable Canon Zoom Lenses, meaning simple point and shoot cameras that are equipped with fixed lens which you are not able to change.

Now this brings us to the questions we need to ask ourselves if we are to choose a Canon Zoom lens. First, from the above mentioned point, are you content with fixed cameras lenses or you want more powerful distance and angular capture ability? Second, consider your budget. Usually at the initial purchase of a camera with changeable lenses, extra lens pieces are not immediately purchased, and latter as financial capability allows, more lenses with different capabilities are added to the arsenal. Third, let's say you are not satisfied with the camera that you purchased and you decide to change. Then will the same set of lenses you purchased fits the new camera?

To make things simple for you, Canon zoom lenses can generally be divided into 3 categories, they are classified according to how big the field of vision they can include into a picture and how much details they can capture, and the field of vision they capture of each lens is defined mathematically by an optic physic property called focal length of the lens.

So, let's say you want to refer to a lens as "normal", this means it must roughly able to capture the view that one normal human eye can. Speaking in technical language a "normal" lens has a focal length of 50mm or so (if your camera is one of Canon EOS models, SLRs, or Cameras that capture images using 35mm films). Now, just as your eye sight, "normal lenses" are only good if you plan to take pictures in a normal close range, NOT good if you want to further zoom in into details, NOT good also if you try to take a picture of an object from a distance, and so, normal 50mm lenses are good when you are taking a waist-up portrait of a person in an ordinary room. To do more than that, it seems you need more "powerful lenses".

Let's get down into more details, Canon zoom lenses that are known as "wide-angle" are those that are designed for the purpose of capturing a larger area field of vision. Wide-angel lenses have 2 most common uses - first, it allows a photographer to rotate 180 degrees to capture panoramic landscape scenes, and second, it allows photographers to capture details of larger areas. Let's assume that you would like to take a photo with a group of friends at a party, in this case surely you need to get everyone into your picture, and for this purpose a wide angle lens is therefore suitable, unless you can climb high or move back up far enough to put everyone into view. On a Camera that records pictures in 35mm film, a wide angle lens would have a focal length of 35mm or less.

On the other end of the spectrum is telephoto Canon zoom lens, the concept of this lens is similar to using a telescope, which means it can put a selected scene into focus and capture more details out of that scene. The final result of picture taken is, the subject or a scene that is being focused on seems much closer than it really is, and finer details can be seen. Telephoto lenses have a focal length up to70mm or more on a 35mm film camera.

We suspect that up until this point you still haven't a single clue as which Canon zoom lenses you need. The categories and description given above are merely just a rough overview and brief introduction to get you acquainted. The decision of which Canon zoom lenses to purchase depends on the kinds of picture you want to take and your experience.