Online Jobs

TIPS60 - Product Commentary - prime lenses vs. zoom lenses

Here is another of our videos offering tips and inisights into the business of photography. a transcript of the video is included after the jump.



TRANSCRIPT:Here are a few thoughts on primes versus zooms. I'm John Harrington. There is a great deal of debate amongst photographers about whether you should shoot with a prime, whether you should shoot with a zoom. Zooms are great lenses because of course you can be at 24mm, wide open and then all of a sudden you need zoom in to 70mm, no problem, a 24-70mm is a really common zoom lens. If you have the opportunity though, I would strongly encourage you to consider primes. Camera manufacturers still make primes for good reason. They're great lenses, they're sharp a 24mm prime is going to be sharper at 24mm then a 24mm zoom will be at 24mm. It's a crisper lens, it really also is a lens that makes you give a little more thought to what you're doing picture wise, your framing, and so on and so forth. You can't just fix it in zoom. Everyone likes to say, ""Well, fix it in post"" or ""Don't fix it in post"". Fixing it by zooming is a little different than fixing it by changing lenses and changing position. So strongly encourage you to consider prime lenses. Prime lenses are a great tool when you're really trying to just be thoughtful about the image you're making.

---

Please post your comments by clicking the link below. If you've got questions, please pose them in our Photo Business Forum Flickr Group Discussion Threads.