Lenses for Photography Beginners

My first camera is a point and shoot camera.  Well my experiences with my point and shoot, camera are quiet funny.  One time in a party, I am trying to take a photograph of my best friends, but I just cannot fit everybody into the picture.  I step backwards further, but there is a wall, and it just is not going to work, so I tell my best friends to squeeze in closer.  The result is, some of them were not in the photo and some were half.  Another experience is, it was during when my wife and I were in Bangkok.  My wife wants to take a picture with our camera of a big elephant in front of her, again it doesn’t fit to our camera and so she keeps on steeping backwards until she feel into a rice field and one of her foot stuck into a mud, what an experience.

Recently I am planning to buy a dslr camera.  Since I am a beginner and due to budget reason, I am planning to buy my friend’s dslr camera since he is upgrading to a higher model.  However, he is selling only the body since he can still use his lenses when he upgrades to another model.  Therefore, I have to buy a lens, but the question is which lens is good for me?  I research in the net and found out that there were three types of lenses.

Types of Lenses

Normal Lenses - normal lenses as being good for taking pictures in close, but not intimate, proximity to a subject, like a waist-up picture of a person in an ordinary room.  These lenses have a focal length of 50 or 55mm.

Wide-angle lens - this lens can take in a large area of a scene.  Like if you are taking a photo of a group of people at a business meeting, you will need a wide-angle lens for this shot.  Wide-angle lens has two common applications, first you can take in panoramic landscape scenes, and second, you can take in large areas of space.  These lenses have a focal length lower than the 50 or 55mm.

Telephoto lens - makes the subject seem much closer than it really is but it narrows down what can be seen in a scene.  A telephoto lens might have a focal length of more than 55mm.

Now I know which lens I have to buy, the wide-angle lens, which is the exact type for my style of taking pictures.