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What you need as glass (Part VI - Tele Zoom)

July 19th, 2011

This is part VI of a series of what glass you will need. Each part will discuss a certain lens type and its applications.

Tele zooms cover the range 70/5omm+. Candid shots, sports, wildlife are typical applications (adding a close-up lens makes most of them as well capable macros).

Almost all tele zooms are actually too short for wildlife. You need at minimum 300mm here + some feature like AF lock are handy.

It is fair to categorize in three groups

  • Consumer tele
  • Pro tele
  • Long tele

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What you need as glass (Part IV - Medium Prime)

July 17th, 2011

This is part IV of a series of what glass you will need. Each part will discuss a certain lens type and its applications.

Medium primes are lenses in the range of 85-200mm (in FX terms) or 58-135mm in DX.

This segment is very interesting as you find here lenses with with the lowset f-number/focal-length (if we neglect long tele lenses). In other words: These lenses allow for extreme subject separation.

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What you need as glass (Part III - Long Prime)

July 11th, 2011

This is part III of a series of what glass you will need. Each part will discuss a certain lens type and its applications.

A long prime for this article is anything from 200mm up. This group can be subdivided further by a section for super-tele longer than 400mm

If we neglect old glass, most of these lenses are quite expensive, they usually start around $4000 and end in the 5-digit range. This indicates that they aim at professionals that cover sports, wildlife (and celebrities sun-bathing). If you are not a professional, but have one of these passions there are two alternatives:

  1. Bite the bullet
  2. Find some cheaper alternative

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