dbirchall's Full Review: Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 II Lens
For most of the last year, I've been photographing meetings of various United Nations processes. Forests, climate change, sustainable development, oceans, whatever. I've photographed delegates and VIPs from over a hundred countries - even the current Nobel Peace Prize winner.
One of the cardinal rules of photographing UN meetings is no flash. Of course, this rule doesn't apply to the delegates themselves, who whip out their little pocket cameras and photograph one another. But for the folks toting around DSLRs like me... no flash.
I started out using a pair of Nikon pro DSLRs - a D1 and a D2H - with wide (17-55mm) and long (70-200mm) f/2.8 zooms. And... they worked well enough, but I found that I still had to adjust almost every photo in Photoshop, especially when shooting in conference rooms with varied lighting conditions (which would be just about all of them). The Nikons also weighed a lot, and the large zoom lenses tended to disturb or distract some of my photo subjects.
In May, I finally decided I could afford a Canon Digital Rebel XT. I already had an Elan 7 film body and a 28-80mm f/3.5-5.6 zoom. I knew I'd need something a lot faster than that, so I picked up the 50mm f/1.8 prime.
It did not disappoint. In my first 3 weeks owning it, I shot somewhere over 2500 exposures, and though the shallow depth of field took some getting used to, by the end of that period, a fair number of my shots were coming out sharp enough to blow them up and count pores, individual whiskers of stubble, and so on.
The best trick, though, was taking pictures in the dark. Sometimes during presentations the lights in the conference room would be turned off, with only a little bit of natural light coming in from a set of windows in one corner of a large room. Believe me, running around in a "dark" room taking photos will get you some very funny looks from delegates! But much to their amazement - and at first, mine - the photos actually came out. At most, I'd have to adjust the color temperature if I'd left white balance set for incandescent light.
The downsides to this lens are few and far between. First and foremost, if you're coming from the land of f/2.8 or slower lenses, getting used to the shallow depth of field can take a little while. It's easy to get shots that are almost sharp but not quite. (Of course, scaled down for the web, they'll still look fine.) And of course as a 50mm, it's not going to be the right choice for shooting distant objects, or for doing extreme close-ups, and so on. And finally, the 52mm-diameter objective lens threads just don't fit my existing 58mm-diameter filters - but that's hardly Canon's fault.
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