The Best Lenses for Family Photography: A Guide

When you first enter the wonderful world of photography, the terminology can feel overwhelming. People talk of fast lenses and bokeh, tilt-shift and hyperfocal distance. It can be hard to keep up and work out what you need to know now and what you can learn later. I’ll start by running you through some of the basic terminology.

Fast lenses

You are watching: The Best Lenses for Family Photography: A Guide

These are lenses with the option to shoot at wide apertures. What is considered fast has changed over the years with advances in lens technology and, of course, one lens can be fast in comparison to another. For this guide, I’ll be talking about lenses with an aperture of f2.8 or above as fast. Very fast lenses, which I tend to use indoors, will allow me to shoot at f1.4 or f1.2. The widest aperture of a lens is described at the end of the lens name, e.g. the Canon RF 50mm f/1.2L USM has a maximum aperture of f1.2. Some zoom lenses have a variable maximum aperture such as the Canon EF 100-400 f/4.5-5.6L II which means that at 100mm the lens has a maximum aperture of f4.5 while at the longer 400mm length the maximum aperture is f5.6, i.e. the maximum aperture moves as you zoom the lens.

Lens mount

Lenses are designed to work with a specific camera system so a Canon lens won’t work on a Nikon body for example. Some third-party manufacturers such as Sigma and Tamron make lenses for different camera systems, but you always need to check that the lens you buy will fit the camera you own. There may also be adaptors available. For example you can use Canon’s EF lenses on its RF cameras with an adaptor but you can’t use RF lenses on EF cameras.

I shoot entirely with Canon lenses and am a Canon Ambassador so I’ll be referring to Canon lenses in this piece.

The RF or EF in the lens names refers to the lens mount on the two Canon EOS systems: RF refers to lenses that fit on the new mirrorless R-System cameras while EF lenses are on Canon’s traditional DSLRs.

As you will notice in this article, I use lenses with both EF and RF lens mounts as I shoot with both camera systems. I am slowly moving towards a completely mirrorless set up and so I will eventually only shoot with RF lenses. Canon are bringing out more of these all the time and the new lens line up is very exciting for us photographers with incredible technological advances bringing new opportunities for creative imagery.

Where you see USM this refers to the small motor built into the body of the lens and means the lens will focus faster than standard models.

IS stands for Image Stabilizer which means the lens has stabilisation built in.

Read more : Best 7 Outdoor Wood Furnaces Reviews 2023

STM stands for Stepper Motor Technology which means the motor in the lens is designed for quieter and smoother focusing which is particularly important for shooting video.

Prime lenses

A ‘prime lens’ is a lens that has a fixed focal length such as 35mm or 50mm. This is in contrast to zoom lenses that allow you to change the focal length, such as the 24-70mm or 70-200mm.

One of the benefits of prime lenses is that they’re usually faster than zooms (only the Canon RF 28-70mm f/2L USM has a maximum aperture faster than f2.8). They’re also usually optically superior to zooms although modern zooms are excellent.

Personally, I love to shoot with primes as I find them more instinctive to use than zooms. I don’t waste time tweaking my focal length. Instead I can quickly move, or ‘zoom with my feet’, to get the perfect angle.

Zoom lenses

Zoom lenses are designed to make life easier for us as photographers. We can change our angle of view without needing to change our lenses and so can move from a wide angle to a telephoto view in a matter of seconds.

The most common zoom lenses used by professional family and wedding photographers are the 16-35mm, the 24-70mm and the 70-200mm. These cover pretty much all eventualities but there are lots of different zooms on the market, from those aimed at travel photographers such as the Canon RF 24-240mm f/4-6.3 IS USM or the long lenses aimed at sports or wildlife work such as the Canon EF 100-400 f/4.5-5.6L II USM.

Wide angle and telephoto/long lenses

Lenses come in a huge variety of focal lengths from Canon’s EF 8-15mm f4L fisheye USM to the incredibly rare Canon EF 1200mm f5.6L USM lens which was on sale in 2014 for £99,000. Yes you read that correctly!

Read more : Levi’s Stadium Seating

Different focal lengths give different perspectives to our pictures and can be used in different situations. With long lenses we can photograph things further away and they also compress perspective which can be very flattering in portraits. Wide angle lenses give us flexibility on our angle of view. We can fit so much in but we do need to be careful of distortion in the corners which can be an issue for family portraits.

The 50mm lens is close to what our eye naturally sees and is an excellent place to start. A 50mm is one of my favourite lenses and one of the best lenses for family photography.

Macro lenses

Macro lenses allow us to get really close to our subjects and take close-up images. Lenses that allow 1.0x or 1:1 magnification at their closest focus distances allow us to record the image onto our camera sensor at exactly the same size as it is in real life. This means that once we look at those images on our screens or enlarge them for print, the level of detail is phenomenal. Those amazing close-up shots of insects you’ve seen? They’re shot on macro lenses.

For family portrait photographers these come into play for taking detailed shots and are a great addition to any kit bag. Most newborn photographers will have a macro lens in their bag for taking pictures of delicate eyelashes and tiny toes.

My favourites are the Canon EF 100mm f/2.8 USM Macro and also the wonderfully versatile Canon RF 35mm f/1.8 IS Macro STM lens which works for macro but can just as easily take a family shot. It lives on my camera during newborn sessions and if I could only have one macro lens, it would definitely be the Canon RF 35mm f/1.8 IS Macro STM.

Bokeh

The dictionary definition of bokeh is ‘the visual quality of the out-of-focus areas of a photographic image, especially as rendered by a particular lens’. In layman’s terms, it’s how nice the background looks if you’re shooting at a wide aperture.

When you first start you won’t notice the difference in bokeh between lenses, or I didn’t anyway. But the further you go on your photographic journey the more this becomes important. Different lenses can have very different looks. My personal favourite lens is the Canon RF 50mm f/1.2L USM because of the glorious look to the bokeh. Camera manufacturers are aware of how important this is to photographers and so have found ways to make the bokeh even better, such as on the ground-breaking Canon RF 85mm f1.2/L USM DS lens. Here, the DS refers to the defocus smoothing coating which makes the aperture even more creamy than normal. You can read more about that on the Canon blog.

So that’s a lot of information just to start with. The big question is, with all those options, what should we have in our bags, what are the best lenses for family photography?

Source: https://gardencourte.com
Categories: Outdoor