Once again, it’s a matter of taste, but the 50mm is better for portraits on a crop sensor than full-frame sensor in my opinion. In the 35mm full-frame world, the “classic” portrait focal lengths are 85mm, 105mm, 135mm. The first is my go-to portrait lens and my favorite lens in my collection. On a 1.6x crop sensor, a 50mm comes close, ending up to be an 80mm.
It really depends on what you are shooting. On a crop sensor, I would prefer the 50mm to the 35mm. Nikon does 1.5x crop, so your 50mm becomes 75mm, which is a good focal length for portraits. A 35mm becomes more-or-less a “normal” lens at about 52.5mm. As I mentioned, I don’t own a 50mm, because it’s boring and s difficult focal length to shoot for that reason. That said, if you can master the 50mm (or the 35mm on your camera), you’re well on your way to being a solid photographer. Despite disliking the focal length, for me, that’s a true test of a photographer’s skill, seeing what they can pull of with a 50mm.
Like others have said, the lens is the single most important part of the system, outside of the person behind it.
I bet that a cruddy lens would make bad photos from a top of the line pro camera, and you could get some good shots from an older, entry-level camera with a high quality lens.
That said, I think it’s important to tailor your lenses to what you’ll be doing. All-purpose zooms are pretty much compromises for everything, and narrower zooms and primes are usually better.
For example, if you’ll be in low light, indoors or doing general non-landscape photography, the Sigma 30mm f/1.4 EX DC HSM is a stellar lens. It’s super-fast and works very well in low-light. You wouldn’t want to use it for sports though, nor for landscapes I suspect.
Bone captured two of the three reasons I hated my 50mm 1.8:
1: Since my kids are moving, i need to use a faster shutter (say 1/100 at least), which means that the camera will generally default to 1.8 or 2.0. The focal plane is just too thin for moving kids.
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I always found myself standing in the corner of the room trying to frame my shot
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The dang thing won’t focus. I can sit there and take pictures of a plain brick wall and 2 out of 3 shots will be fuzzy in the center. The only time I can use the lens is when I put the camera into live view. And that is slow as molasses.
I went out and bought the 40mm 2.8 (still pretty cheap) and couldn’t be happier. Wider view and the shots are always in focus.
Another vote for “50mm on a APS-C is … not what you were expecting”
I would never recommend the “Nifty Fifty” to a beginner unless they really wanted to do portraiture.
50mm in full frame terms is a Normal lens, deemed to reproduce what the eye sees (there is debate about this). My first serious film camera was a Canon with a 50mm lens. I really liked that lens and it gave me pretty good photos.
When I bought my first DSLR many years ago, I immediately bought a 1.4 50mm lens for it, expecting the same joy. I was disappointed… mainly because I did not know what I was buying. I thought I was getting the same tried and true 50mm lens that I used on film cameras, but the APS-C sensor meant it was similar to a 75mm lens in film-land.
That is more of a portrait lens. It has its place, but not in taking group photos inside. I found that the fifty had too narrow a field of view for photos of multiple people in a living room. That’s why I was disappointed.
I did not know what a “Normal” lens was for that old DSLR–it wasn’t 50mm. Each different sensor size has its own Normal lens.
Today I use Fujifilm X cameras and their system is APS-C. My first lens was a 35mm: that is Fuji’s Normal lens for APS-C, and it is thought by many to be the finest lens in the X lineup.
When I do portraiture, I choose the 60mm lens: that is equivalent to 90mm in film terms, and that is the sweet spot for portraiture.
Like others, I have found the Normal lens is kind of boring. I tend to shoot either ultra-wide (21mm film) or portrait–that Normal lens is gathering dust.
By the way, be kind to your models and don’t use anything wider than 50mm (film) for a closeup shot: it will make their features bulge unpleasantly. The standard lens for most point-and-shoot cameras (non-zoom) is usually somewhere in the 35mm (film) range as a compromise between landscape shooting and portraits.
The iPhone 5s has a focal length of about 30mm (film). That means that an iPhone photo will show distortion if you take a close up portrait of someone.
If you want that effect, all is good. Just beware that it is there and account for it.
The nice portrait lenses (80ish mm film) put you so far away from your subject that the distortion is minimized and they add beautiful background blurring (bokeh) to separate your subject from the background. They are worth the money.
I’m very old school about a lot of this. I mostly used medium format, and in the system I used, f5.6 was the standard lens speed. There were a couple of faster lenses, but 2.8 was about as good as it got. Otherwise you had a simply insane lump of glass, and similarly insane price. Yet one of my favourite things is existing light and low light photography. And with slow film. You get used to working with this. One second exposures? Not an issue. That is what a tripod is for, or when out and about, you learn to improvise.
Very fast lenses are nice, and for action work, critical. But they are also a compromise. Like for like (ie with similar quality glass, and construction) a slower lens will typically out perform the faster lens on every quality metric when the two are stopped down to the same f number. There is additional flexibility in the faster lens, you can shoot easier in lower light conditions, and you have more latitude with balancing depth of field. But a faster lens is in no way intrinsically better. What does happen is that manufactures will build lenses in different ranges, and the higher spec lenses may also be faster, but this is marketing and price point setting, not something intrinsic to the physics.
Where digital systems gives the lens designer more freedom is that they can deliberately not compensate some aberrations in the lens, and have them removed in the digital processing phase. Simple geometric distortions are easy. Chromatic aberrations can be ameliorated reasonably effectively even if it is impossible to fully compensate for them. But other issues, such as the surface coatings, internal baffling, higher order aberrations, remain part of the lens designers problem. An issue with third party lenses can be that the correction processing steps may not have the information about the lens to allow them to create the compensation. This is partly an issue with the camera-lens interface, and is probably a moving target. Someone with more up-to-date knowledge might like to comment. But in the end, good glass is hard to beat.
It is worth noting that the in-camera processing of the raw image of the sensor is often not the best job that can be done with the data. Storing the pictures in raw format and using a dedicated package on a PC to “develop” the image gives noticeably better results. Possibly as much as the step between two lens quality bands might.
That all said, I’m very much old school, and in truth, many of the prices talked about for lenses are so low I find it a bit incomprehensible. But making the system you learn with as simple as possible, with the camera doing as little as you can mange to convince it to do, is the right place to start.
Don’t let the damned thing think for you. There are times when it is great to do this - when you just want to capture the moment. But if you want to be able to do better creatively than a set of canned automatic programs, you have to be able to think for yourself.
I pretty much agree with all of this.
There is a youtube series where pro photographers take crappy equipment and try to make the best images possible. The results are impressive. And when I say crappy equipment, I’m talking things like the Lego camera.
I agree. My problem was when I was first getting started I read “portraits” and thought that translated to “moving kids”. That was my own error. Portraits it’s great - and now I have the 85 1.8 on the full frame for a similar effect. On a full frame around the house, I leave the 50mm on the camera so I can catch random stuff with the kids and it’s great for that. When I used a crop sensor, I did the same with the 30mm.
One other problem with the 50 1.8 - it has limited utility. I don’t really care about the fact that it’s plastic and feels like a toy. But because of the slow focus speed, anything with any sort of movement is challenging. Portraits where the subject is still - the image quality is fantastic.
I have way too many lenses for someone who primarily takes shots of kids.
I suspect that you aren’t using some of the controls that your camera provides.
If an aperture of 1.8 or 2.0 is too wide, use aperture priority mode to specify the aperture that you want to use. In aperture priority, the camera will adjust the shutter speed, but use the aperture that you specify.
If the shutter speed is then too slow (which it might be indoors), and you don’t want to use flash, change the ISO to something like 800 instead of the default 100. With pictures of children, the quality at ISO 800 will be practically indistinguishable from that at ISO 100.
Yeah, it wouldn’t be my first choice lens on a crop sensor for kids moving around, unless you have a fairly large house. I don’t remember the focus on it being particularly slow, but, yes, if you’re shooting wide-open, you have zero room for any error, and I wouldn’t recommend shooting that completely wide for most action shots. I’d stick to at least f/2.8. For portraits/headshot-type images, f/2 can be quite nice if you know what you are doing. I like shooting head-and-shoulders portraits of single subjects at f/2.8 and wider. f/2 is my sweet spot for a 35mm camera where you can get the eyes nice and tack in focus, while everything else just softens away from the focal point. As I mentioned above, google “50mm portraits” to see some great examples.
With today’s generation of cameras, I’m comfortable pretty much with any dSLR handling up to around ISO1600 without much difficulty/objectionable noise. I shoot up to 6400ISO on my five-year-old gear. If you’re shooting action, you need faster than 1/100 sec, and f/1.8 is just going to be impossible to keep in focus without great technique and taking a lot of shots. For kids moving around, I’d try to keep my shutter speed around 1/200 at a minimum and my aperture at f/2.8 or so. As long as that falls in around ISO1600 or under, I’m not too worried.
Move the dial to “sports” setting for fast moving kids.
I don’t want to derail this thread but there is just no idealized setting to easily use.
If I have the ISO set on auto, and I set the aperture to 2.8, then the camera will want to set the speed to like 1/30, which is too slow. Then I will have to switch into full manual and adjust the aperture and the shutter speed for each situation.
I want to pick up the camera and take a picture. If I have to fidget with it too much so that I can attempt to capture a fleeting moment, then the camera does not work for me.
In the ideal world, Canon cameras would have a setting for each lens that could be set to say something like never take a picture with a speed less than 1/100 or never take a picture with an aperture less than 2.5.
I am basically physically enforcing that by getting a 2.8 lens and now I just keep my camera on shutter priority.
Some cameras do have minimum shutter speed and minimum aperture settings that you mention, but varies by make and model. No idea how/if your camera can handle it. It’s not lens specific, though. For example, on Nikon’s line of cameras, Auto ISO has options for minimum shutter speed (never take a picture with speed less than 1/100), and then if you just stick it in aperture priority, you can ensure your aperture is never wider than f/2.5, by selecting the aperture yourself. And there you go. It looks like the current line of Canons also has a minimum shutter speed menu item.
Myself, there are only two modes I use on my camera: Manual (95% of the time) and Aperture Priority (the rest.) I used to be the other way around, but it’s always been those two settings.
Canon has cameras that do basically this. There are settings that will not let shutter go below a certain minimum, or ISO not go above a certain maximum. It’s not a setting for the lens but a setting for the camera.
Crap…
All of this talk about lenses and cameras pushed me over the edge…I just ordered the new body I have been dreaming about. And once that comes, I’m certain that the 56mm f/1.2 is soon to follow.
Oops… I just realized I was probably echoing what you had already said upthread. 
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Oops… I just realized I was probably echoing what you had already said upthread.
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No, yours had slightly different points and I like your summary of the 50mm and its pluses and minuses and what type of photography it is and isn’t appropriate for.
Oh, FYI, that 30mm f1.4 Sigma lens I was mentioning earlier isn’t an APS-C lens, so with APS-C sensors, it acts a lot like a “nifty fifty” does on a 35mm camera, and is faster to boot.
Back in the:
- Shutter Speed
- f-Stop (aperture)
- “Program”/'Manual"
*there was, of course “film speed”, but they didn’t want to confuse you, so I won’t.
I always shot “Aperture” and set it to 5.7 (or 5.8 - whatever) as default - check resulting shutter, and if too slow, open it a bit.
The gave me good depth-of-field with acceptable shutter.
The was for average shooting. If it was a “gotta get” shot, I’d play.
Now that speed is also selectable, learn to play with it
All lenses are advertised and labeled with their absolute focal length. A 30mm lens is a 30mm lens, no matter what camera it is designed to go on. So far, no one has started advertising lenses using their crop focal length.