If you have a digital Canon SLR camera, you may have already discovered the confusion and intimidating world of Canon lenses.  Picking out the right lens for the job, it turns out, is not always as easy as it might appear.  This is because there are so many different types of lenses on the market to choose from.  Attempting to take a picture of something with the wrong lens could result in a blurry and unusable image.  Having said that, how do you know which lens to select?  To help you make this determination, a brief introduction to the various models of Canon lenses is in order.

The prime lens is the simple lens that most digital SLR cameras come with straight out of the box.  The lens is simple but functional with limited utility.  It’s not possible to zoom with a prime lens at all.  In fact, if you are using such a lens and you want to zoom in on a subject, you have to walk closer to your subject.  Many people prefer to quickly replace the prime lens with a standard zoom lens.  This lens is a good all-around lens that has the ability to zoom in and out on photo subjects.

The next type of lens to look at is the wide angle lens.  The wide angle lens is commonly used to capture natural scenic images, such as the Grand Canyon or Niagara Falls.  The polar opposite of the wide angle lens is the telephoto lens.  Telephoto lenses let you take pictures of images that are a great distance away so that they appear to be close up.  Telephoto lenses are what you commonly see attached to the cameras of photographers who are on the sidelines of football games.

If you are in the market for a lens with more capability than the prime lens that came with your Canon G12 or other Canon camera, there are many Canon lenses available that can definitely do the job.  If you are unsure of which lens you should go with, the standard zoom lens lets you take many different types of pictures with one lens and is probably a safe lens to go with.

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