Recently, my friend engage me for photographing advise. He bought a DSLR with a 18-300mm lens 8 months ago. I shall not name the brand as I think the discussion over here is not about the brand.
How it was started is that he noticed my posts in Instagram on a similar event as he took and he noticed that my photos were sharper, the edges of the photos also looks better than his and his images suffered from purple fringing. So I requested to view his images and then I asked him what was the lens he used for the shot. After knowing what lenses he used for his shot, I told him it might be the lens limitations.
I also further explains that for a lens with such a long focal length and in a small & compact package has lots of trade-offs. First, the lens usually comes with smaller aperture value which, in return, requires to bump up the ISO to achieve faster shutter speed. Especially when shooting at the tele-end. Second, soft image quality is usually observed, this is usually due to the limitation of the glasses inside the lens. Third, chromatic aberration is hard to control. Every lens does have some level of chromatic aberration. Just how good does the manufacturer willing to control it.
So I also told him that I usually shoot with prime lenses and some decent zoom lenses and definitely not the travel zoom lens. I have also explained the benefits of using prime lenses and shorter zoom lenses. Sacraficifying my image quality and sharpness of the images over convenience is not my way of photographing. Both image quality and sharpness are something that you can’t recover from post processing.
When all was said and done, he still think that the convenience of not keep changing lenses is in his A-list, everything else is secondary. This is personal preference and I respect his preference. I have explained the pro and con and he should understand it. I hope he can continue to gain more experiences in photographing.
Alwin Kok 