Photography Projects are all about capturing and documenting things happening in your life, and these lenses will help you do that easily.
Nobody likes being stuck inside, especially creatives who thrive on being out in the world. Don’t think for one second that just because you are stuck inside your house that photography and your creativity have to stop. We’re living in an unprecedented time right now. Years from now, our kids and their kids will be asking us about 2020. What was it like? What did we do? How did we pass the time? These are the questions we will be asked. Wouldn’t it be great if we could pull out a photo album we made, or share images with those who wanted to know what life was like for us during these weeks, possibly months? Photography projects help us capture these moments that will help tell our stories. The lenses we have rounded up after the break will help you capture daily moments that will relay the stories of our time in quarantine.
Don’t be afraid to take pictures of everything while you are stuck indoors. Are you making some tea? Take a picture. Are you working on a project? Take a picture of what you’re doing. Take pictures looking out from your windows and capture the scenes of emptiness and silence. Perhaps in your boredom, you perfected coffee art. Capture it! Baking stuff with your kids? Capture those moments too. The images you create don’t have to be bangers; the point of photography projects are to journal in order to tell a story later on down the line. The events we are going through now will go down in the history books, so why not create your own book.
The lenses we have listed below are perfect for photography projects. These lenses are affordable, easy to use, have fast apertures so that you can shoot in low light situations, and focus quick enough to capture those fun moments with your kids or even images of your pets. Most of the lenses here are wide to standard in terms of focal length. This will allow you to capture more of a scene to help you tell a story, but they can also be used to capture more intimate moments too. Check out the lenses we recommend for photography projects below, and then create a plan for yourself so that you can document these times.
Sigma 16mm F1.4 DC DN Contemporary
Here are the pros and cons from our full review:
Pros
- Fast aperture
- Weather sealing to a point
- Fast autofocus performance for the most part
- Nice bokeh
- Sharp, surprisingly sharp
Cons
- To be honest, nothing
Buy now Canon M: $399
Buy now M4/3: $398.99
Buy now Sony E: $364
Sony 20mm F1.8 G
Here are the pros and cons from our full review:
Pros
- Nice and light (0.82lbs)
- A small footprint that makes it easy to carry around for long periods
- Super fast, silent focusing
- Weather sealing
- Very sharp optics
- Pleasing colors, and the bokeh isn’t too shabby either
- An aperture ring hat can be de-clicked so that it can be used for video
- Large, smooth manual focus ring
Cons
- A slight amount of purple fringing is evident in some images
Buy now: $898
Fujifilm 23mm F2 R WR
Here are the pros and cons from our full review:
Pros
- Good image quality
- Seriously and surprisingly fast focus. This lens is officially Fujifilm’s fastest.
- Fast focus on the X Pro 2, X-T2 and even the X Pro 1. The latter completely shocked us.
- Nice colors
- Compact size
- Weather sealing
- Turning the aperture ring feels nice and smooth until the clicks come in. It’s a tactile experience that’s just lovely.
- Sharp images
- Fairly nice bokeh
- Affordable price point
Cons
- Something about this lens just simply doesn’t have the magic the 23mm f1.4 R does
Buy now: $449
Tamron 24mm F2.8 Di III OSD M1:2
Here are the pros and cons from our full review:
Pros
- Small footprint
- Lightweight (7.6 oz / 215g)
- Very robust weather sealing
- Excellent image quality overall
- Close minimum focusing distance
- Affordably priced
Cons
- Plasticky build quality
- Quite a bit of optical distortion (although correctable in Capture One)
- Subpar autofocus performance under low light and low contrast conditions
Buy now: $299
Pro Tip: We always talk about the importance of cleaning your cameras and lenses, and now its more important than ever to keep your gear clean. Not only do you want to keep your equipment free from dust, grease, and grime, you need to sanitize it too for your (and others) protection. We have a camera cleaning guide here that you can follow. You can also pick up an inexpensive camera cleaning kit that will help you keep your gear in tip-top shape.
Nikon 24mm F1.8 Z
Here are the pros and cons from our full review:
Pros
- Compact
- Sharp
- One of our favorite lenses so far
- Lightweight
- Incredibly well built. It survived the rain for a long time
- Autofocus speed isn’t all that bad
Cons
- We wish it focused closer
- Oooof, that distortion is strong!
- Autofocus accuracy isn’t all that great in fully automatic AF point selection
Buy now: $996.95
Olympus 25mm F1.8
Here are the pros and cons from our full review:
Pros
- Super sharp wide open and stopped down a tad
- Small and light
- Fast-focusing performance in various lighting situations
- Smooth bokeh
Cons
- We wish it were a tad faster to f1.4
Buy now: $299
Tamron SP 35mm F1.4 Di USD
Here are the pros and cons from our full review:
Pros
- Sharp image quality
- Truly lovely colors
- Weather sealing
- The price tag isn’t all that awful
- Good autofocus
- Great for photographing people and events
Cons
- Why didn’t they give this lens image stabilization?
Buy now Canon EF: $699
Buy now Nikon F: $699
Sony 35mm F1.8 FE
Here are the pros and cons from our full review:
Pros
- Small
- Cost-effective
- Weather sealing
- Sharp, very sharp
- Beautiful bokeh
- The best colors we’ve seen from a Sony lens
- Can focus very closely
- Fast aperture
- With AF-C on the Sony a7r III, it is fast enough for street photography
Cons
- Though this is minor, we wish Sony gave us a working distance and zone focus scale for street shooting
Buy now: $748
Pro Tip: Being able to document everything that goes on in your life on a daily basis is great: it will allow you to look back and tell stories about what was going on during a point in time. While digital images are great, you still cannot beat making an album or photobook, especially when it comes time to tell the story. This piece of software will make it incredibly easy for you to take your images and turn them into a photo book that you can then share with the masses later.
Canon RF 35mm F1.8 USM IS
Here are the pros and cons from our full review:
Pros
- Small
- Lightweight
- Fairly fast to focus
- It’s a lens designed to always be on your camera
- Image stabilization (very much needed in the system)
- Gorgeous bokeh
- Sharp enough for most uses but not as sharp as most L glass we’ve seen and used. Still, it’s a shocker
Cons
- We would have gladly paid more money weather sealing
Buy now: $499
Fujifilm GF 50mm F3.5 R LM WR
Here are the pros and cons from our full review:
Pros
- Lovely image quality
- Super fast to focus, and quiet
- Lightweight and easy to use
- Easy to use aperture control and focus rings
- Weather sealing
- F2.8 equivalent aperture on the Medium Format platform, so bokeh is quite pleasing
- Outstanding value (under $1,000) for a pancake lens on this platform
Cons
- The little lens cap for the hood can be a bit finicky at times
- You cannot use filters with the lens hood in place
- Colors are a bit undersaturated
- This lens is very sharp, but not the sharpest on the platform
Buy now: $999