| Using the 50mm lens for your photography. The topic of using the standard 50mm lens for shooting purposes has been written previously as field-test articles in the Nuts & Bolts column. In those articles, the focus was primarily on the performance of the lenses tested and less on how to use them exclusively for one's photography. Overall, all three of Canon's EF 50mm lenses, the EF 50mm f/1.8 II, EF 50mm f/1.4 USM and EF 50mm f/1.0L USM, have been covered in the Nuts & Bolts column, leaving the Compact-Macro EF 50mm f/2.5 as the only standard lens that has not been subjected to a field-test by me. Nowadays, as everyone already knows, zoom lenses are more popular among photographers, be they hobbyists, advanced amateurs or professionals. Of course, there is a minority that insists on using exclusively single focal length lenses as opposed to high-performance zoom lenses, hence the reason why Canon (or any camera manufacturers) still has a sizeable line-up of such optics in its EOS System. For those who have graduated from photography courses, seminars and workshops, they would know that among the first thing they ever learnt at the beginning of such lessons, was the usage of the 50mm standard lens - the lecturers wouldn't allow or encourage the students from using other lenses such as wide-angles, telephotos and zooms in the early stages. The 50mm standard lens is an important aspect during the beginning stages of learning photography since it is instrumental in seeing the world from a photographic perspective - knowing the limits of what this focal length can or cannot do to one's pictures will lead the photographer towards appreciating the wonders of choosing and using various lenses.
It doesn't matter whether the 50mm lens you have is of the f/1.8, f/1.4, f/1.2 or a Macro type, autofocus or manual since the main objective is to capture on film the images that one has pre-visualized in mind prior to clicking the shutter. The diagonal angle-of-view of a 50mm lens is 46-degree - which is not sufficiently wide to capture a large group in a confined space or powerful enough to bring distant objects into acceptable image size to be recorded on film. This is where the extra work comes in - one has to move himself/herself in order to get the desired results. If the subject is too far, you just have to get closer to the scene. If the space between you and the subject is too tight to include in the frame, then you have to move back in order to fit in everything. << Back to Main . 1 . 2 . 3 . |
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