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The best reason for prime lenses

The best reason for prime lenses

From the course: Photo Gear Weekly

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The best reason for prime lenses

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- For much longer than I've been involved in photography, a debate has raged about prime lenses versus zoom lenses. The general idea, of course, has been that zoom lenses contain more elements, and so you're more likely to have a less-than-stellar result in terms of sharpness, whereas prime lenses are optimized for sharp captures, and will give you better photos as a result. Of course, as technology has improved, and manufacturing processes have gotten better, we're at the point where there's very little difference between many prime lenses versus zoom lenses. And so, from a quality standpoint, there's not necessarily a very strong argument that you should avoid zoom lenses. And, of course, zoom lenses give you the added flexibility of being able to adjust the effective focal length. But there is a very good reason to use a prime lens that I always recommend to photographers, and that is the inherent limitation of a prime lens. A prime lens has a fixed focal length, which means the…

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