Have you ever watched another YouTuber’s video rock your screen with gorgeous clarity and thought: I want my stuff to look like that. I just don’t know how? I get that. In my experience with newbie YouTubers, there is a lot of gear-lust driven worrying about how to make videos that perform well in the ether. What gadgets will bring my stuff up to professional standards? In my mind, the question is always: ‘Am I chasing gear that fits within the reach of my budget and technical capabilities?’ The answer turns out not to be: ‘How can I upgrade my lighting?’ Nor: ‘How can I make my lenses better?’ Rather: ‘How can I cushion my kit?’ You can drop a big-money Teleprompter on your lap and still make videos that suck. You can stick a run-of-the-mill lens on a big-money RED Dragon Camera – one of the world’s best big-budget video cameras – and still make videos that suck. But you can throw a simple nylon lens hood on a gear budget-friendly $20 pancake lens and make videos that don’t suck. That said, let’s not call the $20 tenba pancake people camera a pancake lens for obvious reasons – namely pancakes are made of girdle and soul, not rigid-based Alder.
The Magic of the Right Lens
Here’s an eye-opening thought: you could have fantastic, flawlessly scripted, superbly eviscerated content, but if your lens is boffins, your carefully curated videos still won’t move mountains. The correct lens can breathe life into your ideas, heighten the vibrancy of your imagery, and hold the audience from the opening frame to the final cut.
But the choice of lenses available can be bewildering. ‘Which one should I buy?’ ‘Aren’t professional lenses too expensive?’ So let’s smash the myths and show you how to buy the right lens at the right price.
- Understanding Your Needs
But first, what kind of content are you making? Are you a vlogger that wants to show video from a wide vista, or do you do product reviews where it’s detail that matters? If you’re a vlogger, a wide-angle lens could be a shooter’s best friend; a macro lens could be the perfect tool for a product review, giving you detail in closeup.
- Budget-Friendly Options
Afraid you can’t afford them? Prime lens quality comes at cut-price cost. Brands such as Sigma and Tamron serve as impeccable complements to pricier equivalents that you might buy from Canon or Nikon. So, if you are looking to upgrade from your kit lens, you might shell out only a fraction of the cost on a prime lens.
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- Features to Look For
If hand-holding your camera is often the case, seek for lenses with stabilisation. Most important is aperture: a lens with a wide aperture (low f-stop number) will let in more light, perfect to use in an indoor scene or shooting in low light, and can make your video clips much better, brighter and more professional-looking.
- The All-Rounder
Still not sure? Start with a 50mm prime lens. Also known as ‘nifty fifty’, this is a great place to start, being a fast all-rounder, usually affordable, and known for having great sharpness and shallow depth of field. A brilliant all-rounder that will add an instant quality boost to your footage.
- Seeing is Believing
Take our word for it? In upcoming chapters we’ll go into detail about individual lens recommendations, user testimonials and side-by-side examples comparing ‘before’ snore-inducing shots and ‘after’ improved lenses and better cinematography.
Ready to Level Up?
Heck, switching lenses is so subtle and inexpensive, you might not even notice the upgrade the first time you hit the record button, but boy will your audience. It will instantly improve the quality of your video, helping to keep your viewer watching longer. Your video will be less stilted and more professional, and that will improve your vibe, bringing you new subscribers.
Coming up next, our top three lenses of 2024 – changing the game for YouTube! Whatever your setup – DSLR, mirrorless, or even smartphone filmmaking – there’s a lens for you. To unlock the power of your YouTube channel, you need to have a great lens!
