Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 II
When I was younger I used to have a small collection of cameras. Now, however they have been relegated to a loft somewhere. Last year I was gifted a Canon Ixus 95 IS, and since then my interest in photography has been rekindled.
In December last year I bought myself a Canon EOS 500D, digital SLR with a basic kit lens, and yesterday I decided to purchase a faster, 50mm prime lens – the Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 II. This is the cheapest of the 50mm lenses currently offered by Canon, it can be found for as little as £89, compared to £250 for the f/1.4 USM, and which is less than a tenth of the price of the 50mm f/1.2 L lens that Canon sell.
I’ve had this lens for only a day, but I thought I’d give my thoughts so far. The fact that I’ve not gone back to my kit lens might be sufficient evidence to show that I believe this lens to be of very high quality despite the price tag. I decided to purchase it from a Canon specialist high-street store, and in comparisons between the f/1.4 USM lens didn’t seem to show a huge amount of difference to me. The only real disadvantage I found with the cheaper lens was the focussing motor — it can be a bit loud, although in my experience it doesn’t seem to be as noisy as the 18-55mm kit lens supplied with the 500D.
The lens takes 52mm diameter filters, and the lens does not rotate when focussing, which is great for gradient or polarising filters. It doesn’t use internal focussing, so the front of the lens can extend slightly while focussing, but this isn’t really a huge problem for me. The lens supports manual and auto focus, and the manual focus ring could do with being a bit wider in my opinion. The switch to change between auto and manual focus is incredibly stiff on my lens, and when switching to manual focus mode, the focussing ring can be a bit sticky at first — as if it is caught on one of the auto-focus cogs.
There is no IS on the f/1.8 lens, but to be honest that hasn’t been a huge problem for me. At f/1.8, the lens is fast enough to use fairly quick shutter speeds (1/20 and faster, although you might need to use a higher ISO in particularly low light), so hand shake isn’t very noticeable unless it’s particularly severe.
Below are a couple of photographs taken using this lens, they show the difference in depth of field you can get with this lens, more will no doubt come soon as I blog about trips and holidays, but I thought I’d give you these as a taster of what this lens can do.
OK, well that’s all I have to say for the moment. To summarise, I think this is a pretty good lens, great for people like me who just want to take casual photographs without spending a fortune. This lens would be particularly good for portraits because of the fast aperture. If you have any questions, or you’d like to see photos of other settings that I might be able to shoot, feel free to leave a comment below. Also check out my Flickr account, as I pretty regularly upload photographs to that, and I plan to use this lens a lot in the near future.