My Prime Lens

Finally, after sharing my zoom lens, on the left are my prime lens. What's the difference between zoom lens vs prime lens?

Obviously, your are able to zoom in or out for zoom lens; prime lens' focus length are fixed. Other than that, any other differences? Yes, there are, let me slowly explain.

Zoom lens provide you the convenience of the "walking part", by standing at 1 spot, you will be able to take photos around you based on your preferred composition; when it comes to prime lens, since it's fixed, if your lens is too far, you might need to go nearer to the subject.

You may ask, since zoom lens are so convenient, why use prime lens? This is a very good question, I used to ask that when I just got into photography. Below are the few reasons.

1) Smaller in size

2) Wider aperture (I shall explain in layman's term later)

3) Can be more creative in composition/ angle as you have to move around

4) "claimed by certain expert", prime lens has less glasses than zoom lens, hence, better quality?

Coming back to point number 2, "aperture". What is that? Aperture is just like our window, the bigger the window it is, the more lights will be coming into our house and vice versa. This is a very weird number to understand, the wider the aperture it is, the smaller the F-stop number is. Example, camera aperture range can be from F1.2 till F22. Guess what, F1.2 is the widest aperture and F22 is the smallest aperture. How does it help with more lights coming in? It also means that you will have less shaky image when you are taking indoor and night photography. Other than controlling how much light coming into the camera, what else does it do? It will also control the depth of field, in a more common word named "Bokeh. Below is a very good example where the aperture is wide open at F1.8, the photo was taken at orang asli village (native's village) at Taman Negara a.k.a national park in Pahang.

This photo was taken by a 50MM F1.8 Sony lens. The aperture was F1.8, you can see very clear that the subject in focus is the person, the background and the turkey in front is blurred out, that is the " bokeh" or depth of field we are talking about. So, if you want everything in focus i.e group photo or landscape photography, you will need to increase to higher aperture (or higher F-stop number) i.e F4, F6, F8 (depending on which lens you use as each lens has different sharpest F-stop). But again, the lens with wider aperture, is more expensive. Same like your house windows!

Enough of technical information, let's have a look at the photos taken by my prime lens, let's start with 24mm.

24mm is considered a wide angle lens. If your subject is wide, this lens will suit the shot. This lens viewing angle is 84°, so it is very suitable for wide photoshoot/ landscape. However, it will not create distortion at the edge of the photo, You will be surprised, some photographer even use this as their daily lens.

Next, let us look at the all time favorite street photo lens 50/55mm

Many people prefer to use this as a day use lens. You may use it to take street photography and portrait. It gives you may look at the image, you may have a distance with your subject yet reasonably tight photo. This is 1 of my favorite day use lens too, look at the details and the bokeh of the photo, it's so good!

Coming up next would be the macro lens, 90mm. What is macro lens? It is used to take something extremely small where the lens is able to focus much closer to the subject compared to other normal lens. This lens also allow you to take small details, example you are doing a product shoot on a key chain, with this lens, you are able to shoot the details so your audience can see thr small little details on your product.

Look at the before and after photo, after cropping more than half of the photo, you can see the "little boxer's" details. This lens is very new to me, I am still learning, will share better examples when i am better in it!

Hope you like my sharing. That's all for today, enjoy!