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Your lens is an essential element to good photographs. It’s not just your camera. People spend thousands of dollars on a good camera and neglect the lens.

Change that around! Make sure you buy a good camera lens when purchasing a camera. Buy a good camera as well, but don’t neglect a good camera lens.

Why? Your camera is just the ‘holder’ for the photograph. The lens is what your camera sees all your shots through. A good lens is essential to clear and sharp photos.

With most compact digital cameras, you can’t change the lens. So in that case, don’t just buy a good camera, ensure it also has a good lens.

Avoid a plastic digital camera lens because it doesn’t have the clarity of a glass lens.

What model of lens?

Stick with camera lenses from well known manufacturers like Nikon, Canon and Pentax. Ensure you purchase a lens that works with your camera too. A Nikon camera lens usually won’t work well with a Canon camera.

There are specialty lens manufacturers like Carl Zeiss, Leica and Leupold. If you’re a beginner, don’t worry about these lenses until you are more advanced as they come with very high prices and it’s hard to justify the price for the small increase in quality.

Types of Camera Lens

The most common lenses are : Wide Angle, Normal and Telephoto. The type of lens is determined by the Focal Length of the lens. See below. A Zoom Lens is simply a lens that can change Focal Length from a Wide Angle to a Telephoto (or somewhere inbetween).

There are a number of things to look for when purchasing a camera lens.

Lens Focal Length

The Focal Length of a lens determines the amount of magnification and angle of vuew the lens can see. The Focal Length is measured in mm. It’s the Focal Length that determines if the lens is a:

- Wide Angle; small magnification, wide angle of view. 20mm to 35mm

- Traditional, or Normal; 50mm

- Telephoto; high magnification, narrow angle of view; 105mm to 300mm.

- Zoom; A Zoom lens can change it’s focal length to zoom in. A Zoom lens might have a Focal Length of between 50mm and 150mm.

Some lenses are interchangeable between film cameras and digital cameras, but you need to be aware that the effective focal length CHANGES between film and digital. The focal lengths I describe above are for FILM cameras and need to be multiplied by 1.6 to get the effective focal length on a digital camera. So using a film 35mm lens on a digital camera has an effective focal length of 56mm.

What does this mean for you? It means that you won’t get as wide angle on a digital camera as you would on a film camera using the same lens. A 35mm lens which gives a medium wide angle on a film camera acts as a traditional lens on a digital camera

This is a complex subject, so I can’t go into too much detail here. If you need more help, the best person to speak to would be your local camera store’s resident expert.

Lens Speed

The ’speed’ of a digital camera lens also defines a lens. The speed is determined in f-stops and is similar to the f-stop aperture setting on your camera. Faster lenses are more expensive and usually heavier.

Focusing Distance

This is the minimum distance from the camera lens that a subject must be to be in focus. Don’t worry about getting a camera with a close focusing distance. Concentrate on a telephoto instead.

More Advanced Features

More expensive lenses have more advanced features.

- Vibration Reduction. A feature called ‘vibration reduction’ keeps images sharper when shooting in low light. They help to counter any vibration in the camera. Try to find a digital camera lens with this feature.

- USM USM stands for Ultrasonic Motor. This feature of Canon lenses gives you a high speed auto focus but the main benefit is the ‘motor’ is almost silent, so you don’t disturb people around you when your camera is focussing.

- Filter Thread. When purchasing a half-decent lens, it should have a filter thread. This is a thread that allows you to screw on a filter (such as a polariser) to help when photographing difficult situations. Even if you don’t need filters right now. it’s handy to purchase a lens with a thread so you can add a filter later.

You get what you pay for

Generally the more expensive the lens, the better it is. More expensive lenses usually have a higher number of glass elements in the lens, which also makes them heavier.

Final Notes

While it is important to choose good quality camera lens, for beginners it isn’t as important as good composition. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking you can only take a great picture with an expensive top-of-the-line lens. A badly composed picture won’t look great with a great camera lens.

I don’t mean to discount the importance of a good quality lens. A good rule is to only add to your lens collection only when you have a specific need for a particular digital camera lens.

Do your research and your homework first, and find the lens that suits both you and your camera.

David Peterson has a great love of photography and has created a series of free tips at http://www.digital-photo-secrets.com/ to help digital photography users everywhere take better photos.

DoubleClick’s recent survey indicated that over 88% of online consumers have made a purchase as a result of receiving permission-based email.

The most common forms of permission-based emails are ezines or email newsletters. Currently there are hundreds of thousands of ezines available on the internet.

Ezines are excellent tools for generating new and follow-up sales, driving more pageviews, building customer loyalty, and improving sales credibility and brand awareness.

Even though ezines are vital to the success of every online business, there are some marketers who unknowingly kill their ezines with not-so-wise marketing methods. I have highlighted some of the killer mistakes below.

Killer #1 .. Who needs permission? Just mail ‘em!

A recent study of permission email recipients by IMT Strategies revealed the following:

48% were curious to read the permission email 13% were eager to read
30% were indifferent
7% open it somewhat annoyed 2% deleted it without reading

When it came to unsolicited email or spam:

77% deleted it without reading 16% said they were annoyed but opened it 3% were indifferent to it
4% were curious to read spam email 1% percent were eager to read it

In the above results, we can see that 9 in 10 recipients of permission email were fine with reading the messages, with a near half curious to read!

But for spam, 9 in 10 didn’t even read the email or were seriously unhappy about opening it.

We can clearly see a remarkable difference in the response to permission-based emails and unsolicited emails. Always ask for permission!

Only add subscribers who have consciously chosen to receive your ezine. You’ll reap the rewards of having a highly targeted and loyal audience that are interested in reading what you send them.

There have been many times when I received issues of ezines that I don’t ever recalled subscribing to. These ezine owners had taken their own ‘initiative’ to add me their list. Such spamming antics only seriously piss me off!

Never try to buy a list of email addresses and then send them your ezine issue telling them to remove themselves if they don’t wish to get further mailings. That’s spamming.

Killer #2 .. Don’t let ‘em unsubscribe

Since it is so difficult to acquire new subscribers, let’s prevent them from un-subscribing at all costs. Heck .. just don’t provide them with an unsubscribe option in the newsletter. Then they won’t unsubscribe!

Nothing pisses me off more than newsletters that I cannot unsubscribe from. There are no unsubscribe instruction nor any email address to send an unsubscribe request to.

Such practices are totally unethical and unprofessional. If your subscribers can’t even trust you over something so minor, how would they feel secure doing business with you?

They may even complain you for spamming and tell people about your unethical conduct. Bad news spread very fast on the internet.

When your subscribers decide to leave your ezine, promptly unsubscribe them. Make sure you never email them again unless they decide to re-join your ezine.

Killer #3 .. Let’s blast them with tons of mailings

Recently I had to unsubscribe from several ezines that were sending me a solo mailing every alternate day!

In the beginning I didn’t mind those mailings. But after some 14 days of getting tons of advertisements, I bailed out. The DoubleClick survey revealed that the average online consumer receives 36 permission email messages weekly.

With that number of emails waiting to be read, excluding personal messages and spam, you wouldn’t want to be guilty of clogging your subscriber’s inbox.

Strike a good balance between your profit line and your subscribers’ interest. The lifetime value of a subscriber can be worth thousands of dollars. Why kill the golden goose when it can lay golden eggs year after year?

Killer #4 .. Forget about content, I got no time for that

With an intensely fierce competition for ezine eyeballs, your subscribers may unsubscribe after a few issues if they don’t enjoy your ezine.

You need to publish real content that appeal to their interest. One of the best ways to discover what your subscribers want to read is to check out the ezines of top players in your industry or related ezines with large subscriber bases.

If they are at the top, they must be doing some things right! It will be an eye opening experience to analyze the kind of content successful ezine publishers offer to their subscribers.

Never fill your ezine with advertisements that are disguised as editorials. Quality content is king!

Killer #5 .. The ezine that never came

Some ezine owners produce a few issues and skip the next few. Or they are perpetually late in mailing out new issues.

If you tell your subscribers that you publish your ezine weekly, make sure it arrives in their mailbox weekly. You lose your subscribers’ loyalty and trust when you fail to deliver. How can they then trust you with their credit card numbers?

Publishing an ezine requires time and effort. Writing up the editorial, proofreading and amending the copy (many times), testing the final copy and maintaining the subscriber list can easily take a day or more.

If you can’t afford to publish your ezine weekly, do it fortnightly. I don’t recommend monthly because the time lapse in between issues are too wide. Try preparing future issues 2 weeks in advance. Have available backup editorial content that you can always fill your ezine with at the last minute.

There you’ve it .. 5 guaranteed ways to kill your ezine. Well, I hope you’ll never need to use them

Michael Low is a professional PR Strategist. He provides top- notch PR services at highly affordable rates. Check out his full range of PR packages at http://www.prbuilder.com/pr.cgi?a006