128 — Your First Lens Should be a Nifty 50mm

Pho­tog­ra­phy pod­cast #128 talks about five rea­sons why I think the 50mm lens is the first lens you should get for your SLR or DSLR. Two of these rea­sons are all the aper­ture advan­tages this lens has to offer has and the fact that it’s one of the most afford­able brand new lenses you are likely to find (that aren’t garbage).

If you have a full frame cam­era the 50mm will act as the con­ven­tional 50mm lens from the film cam­era days. On a crop sen­sor cam­era the lens will act more like a 75mm or 80mm lens and many peo­ple are using this lens to make won­der­ful portraits.

Thanks to The Cam­era Store (The largest cam­era store in Cal­gary, Alberta, Canada)  for spon­sor­ing the Photography.ca podcast.

Click the player at the end of this post to lis­ten to (or down­load) the 8ish minute podcast.

This is a 50mm lens and it's the first lens you should buy.

This is a 50mm lens — It’s the first lens you should buy for your DSLR or SLR.

 

This image was shot on a full frame DSLR using a 50mm lens at Palais Des Congres in Montreal, QC, Canada.  The exposure was ISO 400 f/1.8 at 1/2500

This image was shot on a full frame DSLR using a 50mm lens at Palais Des Con­gres in Mon­treal, QC, Canada. The expo­sure was ISO 400 f/1.8 at 1/2500

 

Links /resources men­tioned in this podcast:

Good com­ments from our last pod­cast - Point and Shoot Cam­eras Suck for Learn­ing Photography

The Canon 50mm at The Cam­era Store
The Nikon 50mm at The Cam­era Store
Revers­ing rings at The Cam­era Store

The Canon 50mm at B&H
The Nikon 50mm at B&H
Revers­ing rings at B&H

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Although ALL com­ments are appre­ci­ated, com­ment­ing directly in this blog is pre­ferred. Many thanks to Alain Casault, Lisa Osta, and Tom Trot­tier for their com­ments from the last pod­cast. Thanks as well for the emails and wel­come to all the new mem­bers of the bul­letin board.

If you are look­ing at this mate­r­ial on any other site except Photography.ca — Please hop on over to the Photography.ca blog and pod­cast and get this and other pho­tog­ra­phy info directly from the source. |Sub­scribe with iTunes|Sub­scribe via RSS feed |Sub­scribe for free to the Pho­tog­ra­phy pod­cast — Photography.ca and get all the posts/podcasts by Email

You can down­load this pho­tog­ra­phy pod­cast directly by click­ing the pre­ced­ing link or lis­ten to it almost imme­di­ately with the embed­ded player.

Thanks for lis­ten­ing and keep on shooting!

 

Quality of Lenses

What real advan­tages are there when spend­ing extra money on an expen­sive lens over its cheaper counterpart?


When com­par­ing pro lenses to the ‘cheaper’ lenses, the higher priced lenses deliver bet­ter qual­ity for the most part. Depend­ing on the lens you might also get expe­dited auto-focus, sharper images and less chro­matic aber­ra­tion.‚ Per­haps the biggest advan­tage though is with regard to aper­ture. More expen­sive lenses are often faster. This means that their largest F-stop (small­est num­ber eg. F1.8, F2.0, F2.8 etc) is usu­ally larger than cheaper lenses. Remem­ber, the larger the aper­ture, the more room you have to use a faster shut­ter speed. In addi­tion, the larger the lens’s aper­ture, the eas­ier it is to shoot in lower light because when you look through the viewfinder you are look­ing at a scene through the lens’s largest aper­ture. If a lens has a max aper­ture of F2.8, any scene you look at through your viewfinder will look BRIGHTER than if the lens’s widest aper­ture was F4.0. It makes no dif­fer­ence what F-stop you use dur­ing the actual expo­sure. This doesn’t make a dif­fer­ence in bright sun­light, but in makes a huge dif­fer­ence in low light where it is eas­ier to focus if the viewfinder is brighter. On the neg­a­tive side, higher priced lenses with larger aper­tures will often‚ buy you sig­nif­i­cantly more ‘weight’ as well.

When com­par­ing the results of pro lenses to the ‘mid-range’ priced lenses (pro-consumer level), there doesn’t seem to be a notice­able dif­fer­ence to many advanced pho­tog­ra­phers so long as the images are kept small. This is espe­cially true if the images are for Inter­net use only.

If you’re still skep­ti­cal and want to test the waters your­self, you can always take the same pic­ture using two dif­fer­ent lenses to prove a point. Or, an eas­ier route is to search the web for some­one who’s already taken the time to do it — much easier!

As a final point, when peo­ple (pho­tog­ra­phy newbies/hobbyists) ask me what cam­era to buy, they never ask about lenses which is a mon­ster mis­take. I ALWAYS coun­cil newbies/hobbyists to spend MORE on the lenses than the cam­era, espe­cially the first ‘expen­sive’ cam­era. This is because the cam­era is just a box with a flap to let light in. The LENS does all the focus­ing so a poor lens on an expen­sive cam­era will give you a poor result. A great lens on an aver­age cam­era will give you a great result (in the right hands of course ;) )
When you’re just learn­ing though you can eas­ily learn on a used or lower end DSLR that you’ll surely replace as tech­nol­ogy changes. The lenses though, you can keep those for decades. Trust me, spend the dough on the lenses.

Check out the link in our pho­tog­ra­phy forum for more info.

58 — Lenses — the basics — Photography podcast

Pho­tog­ra­phy pod­cast #58 talks about lenses and what lenses new pho­tog­ra­phers should be look­ing to get. We talk about nor­mal lenses, wide angle lenses, tele­photo lenses, and we even touch on ded­i­cated macro lenses. A good lens is MUCH more impor­tant than a good cam­era because it is the lens that focuses the image. Put a cheap lens on a $1000–2000.00 cam­era and you’ve made a BAD over­all invest­ment and your images will suf­fer. Put a good $500‑1500.00 lens on a good cheap cam­era and you have made GOOD invest­ment. Thanks to danalive for sug­gest­ing this podcast.

Assorted lenses for photography

Assorted lenses for photography

Links men­tioned in this pod­cast:
dpreview.com
Macro on the cheap podcast

Thanks as always to‚ Steven K,‚ Susan, Michael Van der Tol and aophoto who posted a blog com­ment about our last pod­cast. Thanks also to Jes­llo, Gem, fallinto­col­ors, Ryan Mor­gan, spleisher, Marta, johnc24, bleaches,‚ mcnay55,‚ Matt2682, fan­gelico, Moghe­dian, danalive, kear­n­ey­ca­tion, mno­ble, ludovic slight­ly­im­per­fect, len, V-Town, outty, walasy, Ban­dit, and herr_andersson. We LOVE com­ments and sug­ges­tions so please send more.

If you are look­ing at this mate­r­ial on any other site except Photography.ca — Please hop on over to the Photography.ca blog and pod­cast and get this and other pho­tog­ra­phy info directly from the source. I Sub­scribe with iTunes I Sub­scribe via RSS feed I Sub­scribe with Google Reader I Sub­scribe for free to the Pho­tog­ra­phy pod­cast — Photography.ca and get all the posts/podcasts by Email
You can down­load this pho­tog­ra­phy pod­cast directly by click­ing the pre­ced­ing link or lis­ten to it almost imme­di­ately with the embed­ded player below.