Choose the right lens rather than the best lens

Donald Willemsen wrote on Monday 14 March 2022 at 22:52  | reply

Nando, I enjoy reading your articles and I certainly don't always agree with you. But this time I do agree with what you write in this article.

Dear, I completely agree with what you write but … maybe m43 is even more interesting than 1.5 crop as travel equipment? In any case, I made the switch and am very satisfied. Equipment consists of 2 bodies, 12-100, 100-400 and 60 macro and with that I have everything …

Ah, I’ll keep repeating it, photography falls under the heading of art, not technology.
PS. I also got ‘caught’ with 3 bodies and a bunch of expensive lenses … Now I just need to learn how to see 😎

Because I have to take the strain on my back into account, when I go out I limit myself to the absolute minimum. A Sony A7 and 100-400/4.5-5.6 + a 24-70/ 2.8 lens and an Olympus Tough so I can also take photos under harsh conditions and underwater. For macro work I use a couple of extension rings. With a few other things added, it all weighs 5 kg in total. And I have to make do with that. Maybe one day I’ll buy an extra body, but those 600 grams won’t kill me.

What BV46 writes is very recognizable: "The solution is my 5Dmk4 with the 24-105mm “L” on it and nothing else". 98% of my photos are travel photography and I almost always shoot those with such a setup.

Fully agree with your article,
but I do have a remark : in dark situations the AF will work considerably better with a fast lens, because it focuses at the widest aperture, even if you photograph with a small aperture. this was a problem I regularly struggled with before I had fast lenses.

Donald Willemsen wrote on Wednesday 16 March 2022 at 08:55  | reply

I quite often read in the comments that the weight and size of cameras and lenses play a role. Sometimes it is suggested that a crop camera is smaller and lighter than a full-frame camera. That seems like a misconception to me. If we look, for example, at the Canon EOS R5, a full-frame camera, it is not really large and certainly cannot be called heavy. The weight is mainly determined by the lenses. The material from which a lens is made especially determines its weight. Lenses from the professional segment are often made of metal (alloy) and the lenses are made of pure glass. If we look at lenses in the 'cheap' segment, plastic has generally been used there and the 'glasswork' is often also made of plastic, just as with glasses, for example. The difference in weight is therefore mainly caused by the material it is made of. In addition, with zoom lenses, the zoom range also plays a role. The larger the zoom range, the more lens groups are needed, and that also contributes to the size and weight.
It is therefore not the camera body that makes the difference. Full-frame or crop really makes no difference, it only affects the angle of view in combination with the chosen lens.

@Donald Willemsen. Yes, there are undoubtedly many more cameras that qualify when it comes to saving weight and performance. Back then I had a 4/3 Panasonic Lumix DMC-GH1 with a 14-140mm. I regret getting rid of it and am still looking for its successor, the GH2, as a nice second-hand one. If you're talking about weight and performance, this one is a real winner. With the GH3 they started focusing more on video and that isn't interesting to me.

Wouter J. van Duin wrote on Wednesday 16 March 2022 at 14:25  | reply

The difference in weight is certainly not only in the body. FujiFilm X and other smaller-sensor cameras also need lighter lenses for that smaller sensor. For my FujiFilm-X camera I have really fantastic zoom lenses and macro lenses that do not fall short of many much heavier Nikon lenses (such as I used before) but really are a lot lighter. The Chinese prime lenses that have 1.4, 1.2 or even 0.95 as their largest aperture are also small and light, so they hardly take up any space in a camera bag or jacket pocket. Because even with landscape photography, an extremely large aperture and sensitivity can come in handy, especially with extreme wide-angle lenses when something very close-up can also be brought into sharp focus. The fact that these are not automatic lenses does not detract from the quality and is not really a problem with lenses that are both very fast and extra wide.

So many people, so many opinions. And misconceptions.
That is why Donald's remark is quite nice. Here at home we have both crop and ff bodies from Nikon. I have a D500, my daughter a D750. Almost the same size and weight, only her 24-70 2.8 Tamron weighs about 3 times as much as my 16-85 Nikon....
For standard lenses it is less, by the way, her 1.8 50 and my 1.8 35 are not much different.
But otherwise there is (especially at the moment) an incredible amount of attention being given to fast prime's, to use an English word. While we really only still need those in cases where we want little depth of field -or depth sharpness?-, or when we have to work under very difficult lighting conditions. Only people who have to be able to produce photos for their profession always and everywhere will not be able to avoid them. But amateurs like me can do perfectly well without those expensive, heavy and bulky things.
But I do cherish my long Sigma!