Couldnt resist the canon EF50mm F1.8 as suggest by you guys on here and the Canon booklets.

Seems a bargain if its as good as people say it is :D

Gary

Great stuff, cant wait to see some pics from it:D

That's another thing that's on my wish list :D
Apparently it makes a great low light / portrait lens

my 50mm 1.4 lives on my D70.

it took a vr lens to remove it... occasionally :)

Seemed like a good way to spend £70 to me.

Gary

Funnily enough, I've just bought the Nikon version this morning :D OMG how small is it!!

Its brilliant for the cash (though the nikon one has better 'bokeh') :) I have both the canon and the nikon versions and shoot with them most of the time ;)

can someone tell me why that 50mm lens is better than his zoom lens (18-55mm i think) that he got with the camera? Im new to this.

Just got my canon EF50mm 1.8 lens today.
Cant wait to try it :)

Boxcar racer I was wondering the same thing, but was told to ditch the kit lens and get the 50mm, so thats what i have done. :D

well not actually ditched the kit lens, but you know what I mean.

I know that in rifle scopes that a zoom costs more to produce so has cheaper things like glass in unless your paying lots of money.

Now for the same price as the zoom you can have a fixed lens (fixed lenses cost less to produce than zooms) for the same price, but the glass is better.

Might be the same for cameras too or I could be talking complete rubbish.

can someone tell me why that 50mm lens is better than his zoom lens

A prime lens has fixed optics that can be optimised using relatively few elements. A zoom suffers in terms of sharpness, because of all the extra glass that has to be used. :)

You will also get a brighter image in the veiwfinder as the max apature is 1.8. Lenses are always at the max untill the shutter is released, which is when it stops down. Hense the need for a DOF preview....

50mm lens has been the standard 35mm lens for years. It is also fairly easy to make, hence it gets made really well and for low cost.

Images from them can blow away a zoom lens 10x the cost. Of course, you can't zoom with a 50mm, but you can use your feet. :)

If you don't have a zoom on your camera when learning, it is one less thing to worry about. If the pictures coming out of the camera are still crap, that is your fault and not the cheap zoom lens that came with the camera. So hopefully, you learn from your mistakes faster and with it become a better photographer.

The Canon 50mm f1.4 I use on my 1d quite a lot. Perfect walk around lens, doesn't stand out too much, sharp as a sharp thing, nice blurry bits (hate the word bokeh) and combined with high ISO settings can get you shots that will have most people reaching for a flash gun.

Cheers

Ian

Agree with you there Ian, "bokeh"? Might as well call it "vomit" :) Surely those clever japanese people could have come up with a better term than that!

Bokeh, bokeh, bokeh :D

Love you guys :) I've been vilified over on DPReview for daring to suggest that maybe there were more important things to worry about than barely visible differences between out of focus blobs in the background. Like maybe pointing your camera at something interesting for a start ;)

That 50mm f/1.8 is indeed a bargain. I haven't got one though, because it's effectively 80mm on a 1.6x crop, which I don't really use. Seriously thinking about a Sigma 20mm f/1.8, which is my idea of a perfect walkabout lens, but that is £250.

Canon/Nikon etc would probably sell twice as many 50mm f/1.8s if they doubled the price, if you follow my thinking.

Boxcar, the 50mm f/1.8 isn't necessarily 'better' than the 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6. That depends on your definition of what better is. You lose the zoom, but f/1.8 is 200% brighter than f/3.5, and 400% brighter than f/5.6. Get those zoom feet working, and you're away :)

Richard.

I've been vilified... for daring to suggest that maybe there were more important things to worry about than barely visible differences between out of focus blobs in the background.

Amen to that!

But, I have similar feelings towards the other thing that has been mentioned numerous times on this forum and several times in this thread - use your feet not a zoom. 9 times out of 10, this isn't possible and I'm sure some of the brilliant photographic pioneers would have used zooms if they were available way back when :)