• Detachable digital lenses proide a variety of options for taking photographs.camera image by Alexandre from Fotolia.com
  
  If you obtain a digital camera with a detachable lens, you will be quickly introduced to the wide variety of lens types available. Each serves a different purpose and, if used correctly, each lens can produce good results. Consider the rainbow of lenses available for a camera a toolbox where you pull out the lens needed for a particular project, like a paint or brush for a painting in progress. No lens works better than another; instead the categories listed below all produce different photography as needed by the user.
  
  

Digital Lens Types

• Zoom lenses are probably the most recognizable of detachable lenses, and they frequently have expansion capability to bring far-away images closer. Zoom lenses with digital technology not only pick up distant images, but they can also stabilize the images for clarity.
  
  Prime lenses are more appropriate for portraits. They come in particular sizes and do not adjust like zoom lenses. Instead, the fixed lens works well for up-close photography by taking advantage of digital benefits to provide photos made up of millions of pixels in details. These photos can then be touched up, blown up or modified into final portrait images.
  
  

Specialized Lenses

• Macro Lenses: For detailed work at magnified levels, macro lenses help produce close-up photos of bugs, coins and small detail otherwise impossible with a regular lens. Additionally, many macro lenses double as a normal zoom lenses as well.
  
  Fish-eye Lenses - This type of equipment comes with an optic glass piece that practically juts out of its short, stubby body. The fish-eye lens follows its name and allows images that reflect a 270 degree angle. This effect seem to make the world bend around the lens itself.
  
  Wide-angle Lens - Enhancing the ability to capture landscape features, particularly horizons, these lenses work great for outdoor photography or for extreme vertical images. An example would be emphasizing the size of a very tall, thin Christmas tree in a large hall.
  
  Pancake Lenses: One of the problems with a detachable lens tends to be that it sticks out a bit from the camera. A pancake lens incorporates a much flatter design for compact use but still provides many of the same benefits found in traditional prime lenses.
  
  

High-End Options

• Luxury Lenses - These lenses appear most visibly among professional photographers, each one costing thousands of dollars. Luxury lenses don't provide any unique, different benefit than their consumer counterparts (i.e. luxury zoom lens versus consumer zoom lens). However, the quality of the product tends to be far superior than the same kind of digital lens in a consumer version. For example, a photo made with a consumer zoom lens may be fuzzy under close detail while a luxury zoom lens provides crystal clear images even under magnification (higher detail imagery provided). Alternatively, luxury zoom lenses come in distance reach sizes much bigger than the largest consumer zoom lens (300 mm consumer lens versus an 800mm luxury lens, for example). Large luxury lenses in action are frequently seen in use by photojournalists covering professional sport games.