Different styles of photography require different lenses. Each lens differs in aperture, build quality, and other factors.
If you do product photography, some lenses will suit you better than others.
Here is more about what you need to keep in mind when looking for the best lens for product photography.
Cropped or Full-Frame?
Before you choosing a lens, you need to know whether your camera has a cropped or full-frame sensor. The lens work differently, depending on which one you have.
Your lens on a crop sensor camera will act like its focal length multiplied by the crop factor of the camera. If a crop sensor camera has a crop factor of 1.6x, a 50mm lens will act like an 80mm lens. A 50mm lens on a camera with a full-frame sensor will behave like a 50mm one.
Cropped sensors cameras are much cheaper.
When it comes to small objects, a tighter crop often creates a more visually pleasing image.
Zoom Lens vs Prime Lens
The first thing to be considered while looking for a lens for product photography is prime vs zoom.
A prime lens will naturally give you sharper images. Some premium zoom lenses can give excellent results too.
For shooting still liife genres like product or food, a prime lens is more preferable. They don’t have the moving parts that zoom lenses require to change the focal length.
These moving parts can cause a lens diffraction. Lens diffraction is a phenomenon of optical physics. Diffraction occurs when light interacts with an object.
Best Prime and Zoom Lenses
Lens Speed
Lens speed actually means maximum aperture. The smaller this number, the more light that can get in at a time.
This means that the shutter speed can be quicker and the lens is ‘faster’.
A lens with a maximum aperture of f/1.4 will allow you to take shots in a dark place better than a lens with a maximum aperture of f/4. As a still-life photographer, you’ll likely be working in a studio with artificial lighting.
Faster lenses also allow for a shallower depth of field. This means that the background will be blurrier when you’re focusing upon a subject in the foreground. This can be great for some types of still life photography like food.
Faster lenses capture more ambient light in flash photography.
Best option is to choose a lens with a speed of f/4 or below.
Macro Lenses
A macro lens is used for taking very sharp, detailed images close up to the subject.
A macro lens has a magnification of 1:1. So it reproduces a life-sized image of the product on the camera’s sensor.
This means you can get very close to your subject and it will still be in focus.
Sometimes you can see lenses that have a magnification ratio of 1:2 marked as “macro”. Only 1:1 ratio is true for macro.
Macros are also great for portraits and other types of cropped compositions.
It’s a great choice to have in your product photography setup.
Best Macro Lenses to recommend
Focal Length and Minimum Focus Distance
It is a distance between the lens and the image sensor when the product is in focus. It’s always measured in millimeters (i.e. 28mm, 50mm, 100 mm.).
The shorter the focal length, the wider the angle of view and more area you can capture.
It’s really essential to know the focal length of a lens. This tells you how much it magnifies the subject when you take a picture.
The longer the focal length, the farther away you must be from your subject to be able to focus on it.
When shooting with the 100mm f/2, you need to be at least 91cm away from your subject to be able to focus on it.
With the 100mm f/2.8 macro lens, you can be anywhere from 31cm away and create a sharp photo.
It’s useful to know the minimum focus distance if you’re going to be doing macro or close-up photography. You’ll need to be able to get very close.
Conclusion
Some photographers believe that only premium lenses are good for professional work. This is not necessarily true.
The lens and build quality tend to be better in premium lines, such as Canon’s L-series. But don’t think that a lens is better only because it’s more expensive.
As mentioned above, a consumer-grade prime lens may be sharper than a premium zoom lens.
Before buying the certain type of lens, we recommend reading some reviews and checking out forums like reddit or facebook groups.
