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Saturday, January 12, 2008
How good can a $90 lens be? (brand new!) The answer is good, quite good. There's two versions of this lens, a MkI and MKII. The MKI has a metal mount where the MKII is plastic, and is the one i have. Both are identical optically. The MKI feels like less of a joke than the MKII, which feels like a toy.
While this lens doesn't run with the elite glass in this world, it's a lens i highly recommend. Why? well, if you're new to photography and bought a body plus 'kit' lens, you're missing out on some of the most fun there is: shooting with fast lenses. You may also not know the specifics of the term 'fast' or 'slow' as it relates to a lens and its aperture. That's easy, here we go:
There's basically two main bits of information to define a lens: #1. The focal length (usually in mm) and #2. the lense's maximum aperture. So let's take the 50mm f1.8. 50mm is approximately the same FOV as a human eye sees (on a full frame sensor.. more on this later) and it lets in f1.8 amount of light.
The smaller the number, the more light it lets in. A
nything smaller than f2.8 is starting to get fast. The relationship isn't linear, so as the numbers get smaller, the differences between the
m mean more. Demonstrated in the above example, f1.4 lets in TWICE as much light as the f2. f5.6 lets in twice as much as f8. f16 lets in twice that of f22. Each stop lets in twice or half as much light as the next.
What's the fastest lens? Canon made a 50mm f1.0. Yes, 1.0, but it is very expensive and performed worse than the f1.2 which was a fraction of the price. It has now been discontinued.
Leica makes one called the Noctilux which is also 50mm and f1.0 (built and designed in Canada, i must add) It too, is horrifically expensive (and great)
Canon made an 50mm f0.95 for their ancient rangefinder cameras. f0.95??! does it let in more light than there is? noooo that's just the way the numbers work at this extreme end. It was big and heavy and flares like a banshee.
Stanley Kubrick did something pretty interesting, he (and some engineers) modified a specially build Carl Zeiss lens made for NASA, to fit on a movie camera. It was f0.75. He used it to shoot candlelight scenes in 'Barry Lyndon'.
There's some f0.75 and f0.5 and even f0.25 lenses used in special lithography processes, specifically with etching computer chips. I bet they cost a fortune.
Ok ok, what has this got to do with the Nifty Fifty ?? Fast lenses have small depths of field (DOF) which mean you can blur out the background to isolate and draw your eye to the subject.
Kit lenses, cheap zooms and essentially all point and shoot cameras have a serious limitation: They're slow. Check your kit lens, it may be f3.5-f5.6. Your point and shoot camera is around the same - or worse! - you're not going to get much background blur with one of those. It's physically impossible to get that creamy out of focus blurry background with those kinds of lenses/cameras, not to mention you won't be able to shoot in low light either.
So, for $80, the Nifty Fifty is your entry into the wonderful world of low light, blurry background portrait photography. Go for it!
Follow up: Some people have mentioned that 50mm f1.8 is the Plastic Fantastic, but it think that's the term for 18-55 kit lens...? Another suggested the 50mm f1.8 should instead be coined the Thrifty Fifty. A rose by any other name.....
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