If you’re in the market for a new camera lens, you’re in luck…
There are more lenses – and more good lenses available today than ever before.
The problem, of course, is figuring out what lens to buy for your camera. Prime lenses are an excellent choice for many reasons, not the least of which is that they offer excellent sharpness and low-light performance.
Here’s a quick guide to four primes lenses you should own.
Table of Contents
- What Prime Lens to Buy: 24mm Lens
- Get Creative With a 35mm Prime Lens
- The Best Prime Lens: 50mm
- Benefits of Using an 85mm Prime Lens
What Prime Lens to Buy: 24mm Lens
If you shoot a lot of landscapes, a 24mm prime lens is an excellent choice.
Not only do these lenses give you a wide-angle view of the landscape, thus allowing you to capture more of the scene in your shot, but they have top-notch optics, too.
Prime lenses typically have great glass and have fewer elements in the lens barrel than a zoom lens.
That translates to clearer, sharper images from corner to corner, so you can see the beauty of the landscape in gorgeous detail.
But 24mm lenses aren’t just for photographing landscapes during the day.
Since they have large maximum apertures, their low-light performance is on point.
That’s advantageous for photographing landscapes at dawn or dusk, and even for astrophotography as well.
The wide-angle view of a 24mm lens is also advantageous for other photography pursuits, including architecture, wedding and event photography, street photography, and even group portraits. That versatility is just one of the reasons why you need a 24mm lens.
See a 24mm lens in action in the video above by Christopher Frost Photography.
Get Creative With a 35mm Prime Lens
One of the top reasons why you need a 35mm lens is that perhaps more than any other prime lens, a 35mm helps you be much more creative.
Like the 50mm lens discussed below, 35mm lenses are incredibly versatile and allow you to photograph virtually any subject.
So, rather than getting stuck in a rut photographing the same thing over and over, a 35mm lens lets you cut loose and try all manner and types of photography.
These lenses tend to have a small form factor, so they’re easy to use, and though higher-end models can be a little heavy, they are nowhere near as bulky and heavy as a big zoom lens.
Without much weight to carry around, that makes these lenses perfect all-around lenses for everyday shooting.
A 35mm lens also has the advantage of being familiar…
That’s because 35mm is the focal length most closely resembles how we see the world with our own eyes.
That means that when you take photos of people, cars, animals, buildings, landscapes, and so forth, there’s a familiarity about how the images look.
If you shoot with a 35mm lens, it’s also good for videography. The large apertures that many 35mm lenses have help you create gorgeously smooth video even at night. And those same large apertures facilitate beautiful background blur in portraits, too.
Find out more reasons why you need a 35mm lens in the video above by Julia Trotti.
Keep Reading: Largest Lenses Ever Created
The Best Prime Lens: 50mm
If you were to poll a bunch of photographers and ask them what’s the first lens a beginner photographer should buy, a good portion of them will say a 50mm “nifty fifty” prime lens.
That’s because there are plenty of benefits of the nifty fifty that will help you take better photos.
Like the 24mm prime discussed earlier, 50mm prime lenses have excellent sharpness and low-light performance.
On top of that, they are small and compact, making them an ideal everyday lens that’s easy to use and easy to carry around.
Fifty millimeter lenses are also one of the most versatile lenses you can buy.
On a full frame camera, a 50mm focal length is ideal for everything from architecture to portraiture to landscapes. The standard field of view is pleasing to the eye as well.
On a crop sensor camera, a 50mm lens acts like a short telephoto lens, giving you more reach in the 80mm range.
That means you can take closely framed portraits from a greater distance, get photos of wildlife, take detailed shots of landscapes, and so on.
Given their incredible versatility, these lenses make ideal travel photography lenses.
Get more insights on the virtues of the nifty fifty in the video above by Ed Gregory.
Benefits of Using an 85mm Prime Lens
A final prime lens recommendation I’d make is the 85mm.
Though these lenses aren’t as versatile as a 35mm or 50mm, if you take portraits, it’s hard to find anything better.
The 85mm focal length is ideal for portraits for a variety of reasons.
First, this focal length allows you to fill the frame with your subject without being right up in their face. Often, that means that the subject will be more relaxed, which means a better-quality portrait.
Secondly, 85mm lenses produce glorious bokeh, giving your portraits beautifully blurred backgrounds that help set your portrait subject apart from the rest of the features in the image.
There is very little distortion with an 85mm lens as well, so your subject’s facial features – particularly their forehead, nose, and chin, look natural. These areas can look a little large with shorter focal length lenses.
Lastly, this lens gets you into telephoto territory (it’s about 130mm on a crop sensor camera) so you can use it for close-up portraits and then use it for action shots of athletes or to photograph wildlife.
That makes it yet another versatile, easy-to-use lens that should be in your camera bag.
See why an 85mm lens is a great lens in the video above by Jason Vong.
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Learn More:
- Beginner Photography Kit: What You Really Need to Get Started
- Best Camera for Landscape Photography: What to Look For and Top Picks for 2024
Hero photo by Charlie Firth on Unsplash (license)
