Thinking about shooting film portraits with 80mm lenses made me think about how much less complicated things are now. Remember cropping tools? Marking contact sheets with wax pencils? Driving to the professional processor and hoping they can dodge and burn the image the way you envision? And spending lotsa money on film/processing/enlargements…
You mentioned the shallow depth of field that a f5.6 zoom can’t give you. I’ll add that unless a photographer has a fast lens he/she can’t get pictures of the kids performing in places that don’t allow flash. (Although usually that’s not a deal breaker, because you just shoot video instead.)
3200 film never held any charm for me, but it would be bad if everyone liked the same things.
If you expect to be taking photos indoors a lot (Cathedrals, temples, in people’s homes, restaurants) then having the f/1.8 or f/1.4 50mm will be a great advantage. You’ll know ahead of time when you need to put it on so you won’t be swapping lenses on the back of a motorcycle too often. It’s definitely a “nice to have” and doesn’t take up too much space or weigh too much.
If you’re interested in outdoor photography mostly, then I wouldn’t bother. Depending on where you are traveling it wouldn’t be hard to pick up a 50mm lens on the road; they’re pretty common and fairly cheap even at retail.
Oh, don’t remind me. Although, there was something about getting black-and-white film printed on fiber-based paper that just looked so…sexy and creamy.
There’s a gritty look to it that I love. You don’t get that with digital noise. Up until the D3 generation of Nikon cameras and Canon’s 5D generation onward, I would rather have preferred 3200ISO film for black-and-whites than anything dSLRs had to offer. (Color film sucked above 800ISO–Fuj Super HG 800 pushed one stop is about as far as I’d be willing to go). Digital noise is just so ugly in a way film grain is not. And the original 5D’s 3200ISO was borderline. The current crop of sensors, though, wow. I’ll shoot the D3 right up to 5000ISO without any objection, and 6400 is acceptable, too. The D3s is even a stop better–a colleague emailed me a 6400 shot and, I swear, it looked as clean as 200 ISO film.
Another vote for the f/1.8 50mm. It’s $80-ish brand new, and it is a very small lens, even if you’re backpacking. There’s no reason not to own it. I would still want a more versatile zoom (wide to med zoom) for walking around, landscapes, outdoor shooting of any sort. But that 50mm (or even more so the f/1.4) is awesome for what it does with low light situations.
I have the 50mm f1.8, and I use it more than my zooms. Two big pluses for your use is that it’s cheap, and it’s very light.
I’d get the 50mm for candid shots of the locals and interior shots of the buildings. Consider that you may visit places where flash photography is frowned upon, or where you don’t want to set up a flash. For that, the 50mm is great. I got a lot of great art gallery and museum photos in Germany that I couldn’t get with a slower lens.
I don’t think you need a 200mm zoom, but you’ll want a wide angle at the low end. A crop sensor camera like the Rebel is challenging for wide angle photography. If you want to take landscape shots, you’ll want something that starts at 17mm or so.
If you’re worried about what you’re giving up in image quality with the cheaper zooms, there are good sources on the web like dpreview or Steve’s digicams that have lots of comparison images of the cheaper zooms compared to the ‘L’ glass and other expensive lenses. Have a look at them and decide for yourself if you can live with the compromises.
I don’t want to sound like a prick, but it has been many posts later and still nobody has answered this question. I’d like to know.
Discussion in this thread about the 50mm fixed lens makes it sound very appealing. I think I’ll buy one of those. Does it have a metal or plastic mount.
The Nikon 50mm f/1.8D has a metal mount. I don’t usually link to Ken Rockwell, but you can find all the details here. I have no personal experience with the 55-200 VR, but looking online, it appears to have a plastic mount.
If you can afford the 50mm in terms of money, weight and space, by all means take it. If you imagine taking pictures at sunrise and sunset, moonrise, in a club setting, under urban streetlights, you’ll appreciate a nice fat aperture. If space is a real premium, consider an EVIL camera.
Why does everyone seem to hate Ken Rockwell? His site has the most exhaustive analysis of cameras and lenses I’ve ever seen in my life. But if you read people talking about him on forums or blogs, he gets so much hate.
What, specifically? He always posts comparison pictures where you can see the sharpness and stuff of various lenses side-by-side. I can’t see how you can argue with that.
His insistence on shooting in JPEG, for one. I don’t even know where to begin arguing with this unique take on the subject.
But, for the sake of fun, let’s take one paragraph, and let me explain where Ken and I part ways:
Now, this was written in 2008, but in 2008 I was already fully converted to RAW. I had to beg a couple of my associate photographers to shoot RAW, because shooting JPEG made post-processing harder and took up more of my time than JPEGs. Once you get over the little bit of a learning curve and use digital asset management tools like Lightroom or Aperture, RAW becomes a breeze and saves you time on the back end, and gives you far greater flexibility with the file. You create a basic profile for your cameras with settings you like (just like your in-camera JPEG engine has) and, if you like how it looks straight out of the camera, great. You don’t do anything else with it. But if you need to tweak it, you can save files that would be unsalvageable with JPEGs. You can burn in details that are completely clipped in JPEG’s 8-bit color space. You can adjust the white balance in post with no image degradation whatsoever (white balance is metadata–it does not affect the raw capture). It would take me significantly longer to salvage a marginal JPEG exposure, whereas fixing it in RAW was a snap.
I edited well over 100,000 digital photos last year, according to my 2010 Lightroom catalog. If you asked me whether I’d rather edit 100,000 JPEGs or 100,000 RAW images, I will tell you RAW without any hesitation.
Digital cameras are fine for landscapes–I have no idea where he gets this idea. Just what the hell is a digital camera “for” exactly?
I’m not going to quibble too much with this. Here, he may have a point.
Hobbyists? Is he intimating that pros don’t use digital SLRs for landscapes?
Wrong, wrong, wrong. First of all, let’s start with a “correctly” exposed image. A “correct” exposure is slightly different for RAW and JPEG, but I won’t get into too many details right now. A properly exposed RAW file is going to have more dynamic range than a JPEG file, because of the nature of the format and how the data is stored. From personal experience, I would say you eke out an extra 1 1/2 - 2 stops of detail in an optimal RAW exposure that you would lose in a JPEG.
The amount of adjustment a JPEG allows you is severely crippled compared to a RAW file. First, as I mentioned above, the white balance issue. If you completely eff up your white balance, for whatever reason, you can change it after the fact with *no degradation to your image whatsoever. With JPEG, you are making big compromises, and some white balance errors are going to be completely unsalvageable, as the color data simply is not there. If you blow your highlights (or, in actuality, if it appears your highlights are blown because of the JPEG rendering of your RAW image), you can salvage them up to about 1.5 stops or so, because in the 12-bit RAW data, there actually is detail there, where the 8-bit JPEG conversion clips all those highlight values to 255,255,255. In RAW, half of your information–that’s 2,048 data points, is dedicated to the brightest stop of your picture. This means that values that may clip once they’re processed into a JPEG actually contain a lot of meaningful data that can be recovered. Once you commit it to a JPEG in camera, and lose your RAW data, it’s lost. That 255,255,255 or nearly rounded off values cannot be recovered and no color information can be gleaned from it, even though the RAW values might have info that there’s actually a blue sky back there somewhere.
And so on, and so forth. This type of internal dialogue is pretty typical with half the stuff I read from the guy. He does make good points from time to time, but his track record with me is such that I simply do not trust anything he says. If I’m being charitable, I’ll say it doesn’t apply to me and the way I shoot.
Decided to go with the XSi, Canon 18-135, and the f1.8 50mm. The three together cost me $854 used, which I am pretty happy with. Now lets just all cross various appendages and hope they make it to me in Nicaragua relatively quickly and unscathed :eek:.
One thing to note about the 50mm f1.8 is that it’s not image stabilized. It’s also a very lightweight and short lens, which can make it a little harder to stabilize the camera. So you might want to invest in a Gorillapod, or carry a monopod with you or something so you can take full advantage of it. Or, just make sure you’re not going too slow with the shutter speed and crank up the ISO if necessary in low light.
Since I’m too late to chime in to say that for backpacking I’d pick one superzoom and one small light wide-aperture prime, I’ll instead say that while some sort of support is nice, but in a case of backpacking space and weight is at a premium. Rather than a monopod or even a Gorillapod I would suggest learning a few tricks for bracing and steadying cameras using whatever is handy. Or bring a beanbag, or a cord with a tripod bolt on the end. Beanbags can be used either under a camera, or on top (it’s easier to hold a more massive object steadier).
There’s - as always - a lot of votes for a fast 50. For a 1.5/1.6x crop sensor camera, I’d rather go for a fast 35, like Canon’s EF 35/2.0 or Nikon’s 35/1.8.
50mm is the classic normal lens for 24x36mm digital and film, but on a crop sensor it works like a short portrait tele lens, while 35mm is close to a normal lens. For general photography in poor light, I’d prefer a normal lens.
The main feature of the Canon 50mm f1.8 is its value. No other lens can touch its bang for the buck factor. That’s why it’s recommended so often. Obviously the 50mm f1.4 and f1.2 are better lenses, and the 35mm is nice too, but they’re all way more expensive.
The other advantage of the f1.8 for backpacking is that it’s very light. The better 50mm lenses are all significantly heavier.
My camera and lenses arrived on Friday. Took pictures all weekend, and the lenses were exactly what I needed it. Loved them both and everything about the camera. Stolen on Monday, along with my Kindle, on the bus in Nicaragua. Somebody used my Kindle to buy a subscription to a Spanish newspaper. There is a faint hope that I can track it down through that, but I’m not holding out much hope.