Total beginner here, looking to buy my first camera and looking for a lens that would be able to deal with the widest range of situations (a zoom one) all in one package. I’ve got about 600usd to spend on it and I’m fully aware it’s not much, but I want to get a good start.
I can’t buy used ones where I live (even from online platforms around the world), so it’d have to be new.
At the moment my goal is to take photos of pretty much everything: nature (apart from moving animals), landscapes, streets, portraits, objects (large and small), architecture, and I also plan to film videos quite a bit. Nothing fast moving and no sports though.
I’d love to shoot in close-up macro, too, but I understand it’s not possible within one lens.
What could you recommend?
It might be worth posting to a single community and then cross-posting the thread in the future. It also might be worth spacing out the cross posting by a day or so if you don’t get much traction initially. Putting the same post in multiple places does get you more eyeballs, but it fragments the conversation some.
I went to B&H, filtered by RF mount with auto focus and sorted by price.. I’m excluding things that don’t seem like great recommendations.
I split this into two groups: primes and zooms. Things that seem like great suggestions are bold.
Canon offers a number of fairly fast/cheap/compact (ie inconspicuous) primes. They’re not going to be the optical nirvana of $1-3k lenses, but they will generally exceed the optical quality of cheap zooms. You can always “zoom” with your feet but this has a limit. There are a few macro options, as well as a solid option from Sigma. Choices in this category:
Zooms. Budget zooms generally aren’t fixed aperture, so as you zoom in you’ll gather less light. There is one fixed aperture zoom in your price range and it also happens to be optically great.
Thank you. Great recommendations! What one or a few important things do you think I’d not have access to with the stock 18-45 lens?
Kit zooms these days really aren’t bad starter lenses and I wouldn’t immediately jump to replace it if the lens is meeting your needs. I would consider this from two angles.
First, is the lens preventing you from achieving the photos you want? IMO there are only two things here:
If the answer to either is “yes” you know the answer to your question - you want more/less focal distance and/or more light gathering ability. If the answer to both 1 and 2 is no, then you don’t need a new lens and this brings us to the second area.
Second, does the lens give you the aesthetic you’re after? Kit lenses are generally decent, but the opportunities from improvement come from three big things: subject isolation, “pleasing” image quality (bokey, rendering, etc), and sharpness. A “faster” lens will offer much more isolation than your kit lens. The others are really up to your eye.
Not much else to say but thank you! You’ve basically given me a quick tour of the photography world and I hope others can get as many insights as I have 🙂
No worries, happy shooting! Make another post or three if you hav questions! 🍻