gammamonk said:
Thanks for all the advice everybody. I'm looking at the E500 that Abstract recommended on Amazon right now, but I'm a little confused about the lenses. Can someone give me a quick overview of the difference between 12-54mm and 40-150mm etc? Say I only want one lens right now, which type do I want? What do the numbers really mean?
For a wedding, I'd say go with the 40-150 mm. With lots of people around, you may not always be close to the bride and groom and so you may need to zoom in lots to get a closer shot of them.
Basically, the numbers mean this: 12-54 mm means that the focal length of the lense can be adjusted from a minimum of 12 millimetres to a maximum of 54 mm. Ok, so big whoopdee-doo, right? In english, short focal lengths provide wider shots. Use any digital camera and zoom all the way out. You can see more because you're zoomed out. That's what 12 mm is. The smaller that value is, the wider your shot can be. A 12 mm lense will probably take a photo with an angle of around 75 to 90 degrees. Ever wonder why you see some photos out there that seem "wide" (eg: like a widescreen TV's screen)?? It's because they have a lense that has a really short focal length, say 12 mm on a dSLR.
The 54 mm is the most it can "zoom in," so to speak. This isn't much. It's like the reach that a typical "3x Optical Zoom" camera has. If you use a plain old 3x optical zoom camera, and you use it to zoom in as much as possible, that's what 54 mm is similar to in the DSLR world.
With a 40-150 mm lense, you can't get wide angle shots like you could with a 12 mm lense, and while this may seem important if the church is beautiful, I think you'd miss more shots by not having a lense that has a focal length of at least 100 mm. It would let you "zoom in" much more. On the other hand, the f-number is usually very large at 150 mm focal length, which is bad in low-light conditions. The f-number is an indication of how wide the "aperture" (ie: the opening/hole at the front of the lense that lets light pass through it) is with respect to the lens' length --- the smaller the number is, the larger the aperture is. So f/2.8 is better under dark conditions than a lens that says f/5.6 because the hole is larger (I know that it technically isn't, but work with me here!
).
If the lens says 40-150 mm, f/3.5-5.6, it means that at 40 mm focal length, the maximum aperture size is f/3.5, while at 150 mm, the maximum aperture is f/5.6. So in this example, the relative hole size is smaller at 150 mm than it is at 40 mm, so the lense is better at 40 mm in low light conditions than at 150 mm.....a bit of a drawback of using a large zoom lens. For that, you'd need to use a longer shutter speed (eg: 1/20 seconds) and a tripod to make sure photos don't end up blurry because of your hand motion. Of course, a tripod won't help you if the bride and groom are moving quickly, since they'll probably help blur the photo as well.
I'd still go with the 40-150 mm lense, but never use it beyond 100 mm or so so that I can get a maximum aperture size that lies somewhere between f/3.5 and f/5.6, because I doubt the lense would be useful at f/5.6 if the place isn't lit properly.