Photography 101: Continuing Education—Lenses

Tony Northrup is a gear-head. And thank God for that. He does all the computations and testing that I’m too lazy to do (or too stupid to do). In this video he answers the question: Should You Use Full-Frame Lenses on Crop-Bodies? I’ve been intrigued with this question since I switched from film to digital technology in 2009. For years I wasn’t able to get a satisfactory answer to my question: If you crop a full-frame image to APS-C size (Nikon=1.5x or Canon=1.6x) will the result be as good (or better) than the un-cropped APS-C image? Everything I read was anecdotal and not backed up with data.

Here Tony explains (in excruciating) detail why you don’t have to buy expensive full-frame lenses for your crop-body cameras to get great results. We learn early on to buy the best lenses we can afford and those are typically lenses for full-frame camera…