The Best Lenses for Digital SLR Cameras

Trying to find the best lenses for your digital SLR camera can feel a bit like hunting for the old needle in a haystack.

Camera manufacturers offer a huge selection of their own lenses, and then you have several of third party companies that you can also choose from.

While you can count the number of available digital SLR cameras on your hands, you need a wall chart to keep track of all the lenses.

Let's get the bad news out of the way first: lenses are EXPENSIVE (the good ones at least), and I'll talk more about this in just a moment.

The good news? I've spent hours researching lenses across all of the camera manufacturers, and have put my findings about the best lenses for digital SLR cameras into the pages that follow.

Let's get started!

Avoid the Bargains

Let me say this right upfront to make it clear: when it comes to lenses for your digital SLR, don't buy on price alone.

As you research lenses more, you'll find a huge price discrepancy between them.

Some lenses cost $6,000 while others cost $80.

A lot of factors affect the price of a lens including its focal length, maximum aperture, and any additional features it may include (like image stabilization).

But here's the bottom line: cheap lenses take poor photographs.

Let me ask a few questions to help make this point:

Would you purchase a million dollar home and then put down linolium floors everywhere?
Would you get the cheapest tires you could find to slap onto your high-end sports car?
If you have poor eyesight, do you typically get the cheapest glasses you can find?

This last question is the best real-world parallel I could come up with for what cheap camera lenses are like.

Glasses are designed to bring your surroundings into sharp focus. The cheaper the glasses, the less capable they are of correcting your vision.

In a similar vein, the cheaper the lens, the less capable it is of creating a clear, focused image on the camera's sensor.

But here's the kicker: cheap low-quality lenses don't just affect the CLARITY of your photos, they also affect the COLOR and the CONTRAST.

Light actually contains a spectrum of colors - the same spectrum that you see in a rainbow.

Low-quality glass can distort red, blue and green color wavelengths passing through the lens. This distortion yields colors that are not true to the scene as it appears to your eyes.

This same low-quality glass can also reduce the contrast in your photos, making subjects look like they're behind a screen or fog.

On the flip side, very expensive lenses are made up of multiple glass elements and each one is specially designed to prevent the light passing through the lens from distorting.

End result? Photos that are crisp, clear, colorful and have plenty of contrast.

Find the Best Lens For You

Now that I've preached the importance of being willing to spend a fair price for your new lens, let's talk about what I've done to find the best lenses.

First, each lens is associated with a photography style, since the same lens that you use for portraits will not be ideal for wildlife.

I've grouped them into the following lens categories: portrait, landscape, action, low-light, close-up (macro) and wildlife.

The amount of research that I've put into each one of the pages that follows is substantial.

Since I wanted to find the best lens for each photography style, I followed the same steps that I take when I'm buying a lens for myself:

I find a group of lenses that match the primary criteria for the photography style (focal length and maximum aperture)
I narrow down the list to three lenses or less per manufacturer based on the special features of each lens
My final selection of the best lens in each category is determined by reading reviews - a LOT of them - and weighing the quality of the lens against how much it costs

While you can certainly do the same research on your own (and I encourage you to do so if you want to take the time) my goal behind all of this is to provide you with a quick introduction to some exceptional lenses.

People ask me to recommend lenses all the time, and it's due to these many requests that I finally decided to write down my findings. Hopefully both you and I can benefit from the information that follows.

The Best Lens Categories

It takes me several weeks to put together each on of these pages, so please bear with me. I will get to each photography style in turn, and will activate the links below once the page is ready.

I will also announce when new lens pages become available at the Digital SLR Guide Weblog, so keep an eye on that for future updates.