In photography the notion of a holy trinity of lenses refers to a set zoom of lenses that cover the full range of focal lengths, going from the ultra wide 10 mm to the long 200 mm. This is typically achieved by 3 lenses that cover each their area:
- Extremely wide – 10-24 mm
- Standard zoom – 24-70 mm
- Long zoom – 70-200 mm
- (and some also have the 200-500 mm, good for wildlife and sports photography)
The beauty of this lineup is that you do not need any other lenses!
The series of lenses is illustrated in the graphics above. Notice that all the above refers to full frame equivalents, so if you are shooting on a cropped sensor, you need to apply the cropping factor to get to the right values (1.5 for DX or APS-C lenses), but the idea is the same: to have a few lenses to cover the full range of focal lenghts.
Not all photographers like zoom lenses, and there are several reasons for this, one being that they are expensive compared to prime lenses, another that their weight can be significant, especially in the long end of the scale and then some argue that prime lenses with fixed focal lengths are more sharp than zoom lenses. Those who agree to these arguments typically cover the focal range with prime lenses to achieve the same end.
As you can see in the graphics above, the angle of view changes as you move up through the focal range, starting at a whopping 130 degrees and a lens of 10 mm (far left), ending at 5 degrees or less at a super long lens (far right). Here the photographer working with primes will have to change lenses each time a new focal length is needed, and as the prime lens only cover a point on the scale illustrated above, you may risk that the prime lenses in your bag does not make the desired focal length available. In such cases a prime lens that typically is too short is used and the frame is afterwards cropped in post processing. Some also “zoom with their feet”, but you have to remember here that the angle of view does not change, no matter how much you zoom this way, so you will not get the same result (due to compression) as you did would with a zoom lens.
Questions and comments
Thank you for reading this far. I hope you found this blog useful. Questions and comments (and likes!) are more than welcome!