Get more from your lenses

It’s often said with film photography that the lens is more important than the camera and while that relationship has shifted now that most of us are shooting with digital cameras that have a variety of sensors, a wide array of settings and different processing engines, the lens that you use still plays a huge role in determining the nature and quality of the image that you produce. Naturally, if you want to get the best from your lenses, you should keep them spotlessly clean, but what else can you do to ensure you get the best possible results? Read on to find out.

Find the sweet spot

It’s not just the depth of field that changes with aperture, it’s the sharpness of the image at the focus point too. In fact, lenses don’t capture the same level of sharpness at every aperture, focal length or focusing distance, which can make selecting the optimum aperture tricky unless you’ve done a bit of testing. Fortunately, that testing is pretty easy, it just takes a little time. All you need to do is photograph a flat subject with plenty of detail (a brick wall is a classic example) at