Canon 50mm f/1.8 II

[lunathea]

So I'm thinking about buying this lens just to start getting comfortable with people shots. I'll be starting off with my brothers who are all crazy active and expressive. I want to get up close and personal shots like this



but I'm wondering if I will be limiting myself with this lens in terms of action shots. One of them is a crazy awesome skateboarder and seeing I can get right up next to the action will this lens still give me good results? Hmmm I'm not even certain if this question makes sense lol thanks guys!

[dlambert]

No, that's actually a great question. That lens is very fast optically, but I'm less impressed by the focus speed. It's a good portrait lens - the wide aperture means it's got a nice, shallow DOF and it's good in low light. I think the bokeh is a little funky wide-open, but it looks very nice at f/2.8, which is still very good for portraits.

The focus motor in this lens is a micro-motor design, not the faster, quieter ultrasonic (USM) motor in Canon's higher-end lenses. This means no full-time-manual focus, and more importantly for action shots, slightly slower focus speeds. I'm not sure you'll see enough difference to justify moving up to a more expensive lens, but those are definitely two completely different lens characteristics, so you're thinking about this the right way.

[inkista]

Yeah, the 50/1.8 II isn't a great action lens. You may want to consider grabbing the EF 85mm f/1.8 USM instead. If the majority of the portraiture you want to do is headshots, the longer focal length may not be a problem (if, however, you want to do full-length portraits or group shots, the 85 may be too long, especially on a crop body).

[lunathea]

LOL now I have no idea what I want to do. Thanks very much for the quick replies! The situation atm is, I'm extremely fresh to all of this and want to dip my toes in everything a bit. I love wildlife and landscape stuff but I also adore my brothers and the quarky things they do...like hiding from the camera...


So I was thinking that lens was a nice cheap solution for capturing them indoors, zoo, park w/e. I'm wondering if I should just stick with the 18-55is and 55-250is I have atm and start saving for an external flash instead. Hmmm I don't know.

[inkista]

My advice would be get the 50/1.8 II and just use it for portrait work, and don't worry about the action stuff for now. The 50/1.8 II is cheap and that's its main virtue. You aren't take a huge gamble with it: if you don't like it, you can sell it on and get back most of your cash. And most importantly, it will teach you about aperture.

A flash is a great tool, and more likely to be a permanent one in your bag, but I tend to caution people that they really need to be fully conversant with ambient exposure: trading off stops between iso, aperture, and shutter speed, and being comfortable shooting in full Manual mode on their camera before they go there. Otherwise, it's just going to be harder to figure out exposure when you throw in flash power, subject distance, and balancing flash against ambient into the mix with a flash.

The one other basic piece of equipment to consider is a tripod.

[dlambert]

Agreed. You can't touch another f/1.8 lens for the price of the 50, and it's versatile enough to cover most of your needs very well. There's certainly no harm in using it for action shots -- you're going to have to learn a bunch of stuff about focus modes, shutter speed, and so on, anyway.

The flash is another great tool to have, as inkista mentioned, but it's not a cure-all for action shots, either. In addition to balancing lighting sources, you'll want to consider whether you'll want to use flash sync speeds faster than 1/250. As far as I know, only Canon flashes can sync faster than 1/250. This might not be a huge deal for a skateboarder - not sure exactly how fast he's moving - but it's worth considering.