Which lens should I buy?

[elenichatzo]

Hello,

 

since I'm a new member of this community and generally relatively new to photography, I would like to apologise in advance for any mistake..

 

To the topic now, I'm very keen on street photography. I love capturing buildings and in general i love landscape photography. I want to upgrade my lens so I really don't know which lens should i buy in order to shoot sharp and easily buildings/architecture, landscapes, sky and stars and of course night photos. 

 

I really don't know if it would be better to purchase Samyang 12mm f2.0 or something similar.

 

 

 

 

[Pieter]

Hi Elenichatzo,

You have quite a range of subjects you want to capture with a single lens. It would help to know which lens you're currently using and at what focal length for each purpose. Astrophotography generally requires a much wider field of view than e.g. street photography. The Samyang 12/2 is perfectly suited for astro, not so much for street.

However, from your question I understand you're quite new to photography and want a lens which is easy to operate. The Samyang is a manual lens: manual focus and manual aperture adjustment. For general street photography you might prefer an autofocus lens with a longer focal length. Considering you mention night photograpy I think you'd prefer a fast lens, so the Sony 10-18/4 zoom is not really an option.

 

Considering all, I'd suggest the following options:
 - Samyang 12/2 (great for astrophotograpy and some landscapes and architecture, but too wide for more general use. And all manual)

(- Alternatively, there's the Zeiss Touit 12/2.8, but it doesn't offer anything over the Samyang except autofocus. It's slower, much more expensive and not any sharper)
 - Sigma 16/1.4 (great for astro, landscapes, architecture, nighttime but probably still a bit wide for street photography)
 - Sony/Zeiss 24/1.8 (great general purpose lens, very sharp and decent for pseuso-macro photography as well. Arguably a bit too long for astro/architecture and quite expensive)

I currently own both the 12 mm Samyang and 24 mm Sony/Zeiss. The 24 mm gets much more use as 12 mm is quite a specialty focal length: you get a lot of distortion, especially noticeable when photographing people. I am contemplating whether the Sigma 16/1.4 can replace them both, but I think 16 mm is still too wide for photographing people.

If you currently own the 16-50 kit lens, try it a bit at 16 and 24 mm for various purposes and see how it works for you. And remember 12mm is really much wider than 16 mm.

[Guest Jaf-Photo]

For the subjects you describe, the Samyang 12/2 would be an excellent choice. It is wide, affordable and have good optical properties. Being a wide lens, it's quite easy to focus manually. Shooting buildings, landscapes and stars, you'll be using small apertures with a great depth of field. The focus peaking function should allow you to set acceptable focus most of the time.

 

So, yeah, great choice. I don't think you can go wrong, provided you don't mind working with manual focus.

[Silkyjr]

Thanks for the help and suggestions going to try the Sony 24.

[Guest Jaf-Photo]

Thanks for the help and suggestions going to try the Sony 24.

Excellent lens and easily my favourite APS-C lens for Sony E mount. It is a crop lens which means that it's the equivalent of a 36mm lens on FF. That's not wide enough to take in the whole of a building from street level nor will it do wide vistas. You can try the field of view by zooming your kitlens to 24mm and trying out your typical shots (assuming you have an A6x00 camera; on an A7 kamera it would be 35mm).

 

A 12mm focal length is much wider and takes in a much larger view. Every mm makes a difference at the short end. The 24mm is more for street scenes, i.e. taking photos of people in the street.