Your most "fun" lens?

[Daniel Browning]

Great post. For me, the 24mm f/1.4 II is the most fun. Compressed telephoto shots with blurry backgrounds and thin DOF are a dime-a-dozen. The background is either very far from the subject or only includes one or two related elements. That's fine for what it is, but I like having the ability to get up close and personal with the subject, where a perspective that feels really immersive is highly valuable. This allows you to bring in far more background and context about the subject. It's no longer just a distant person against a blurry background, but an upclose person standing in a real-life environment. It allows me to tell a story through the picture. But I still want to have a powerful subject. Many wide angle shots have so much bright, colorful, and competing backgrounds it draws attention away from the subject. You could move to a more boring background, but that takes away from the picture too. The 24mm f/1.4 allows you to keep the interesting background (and foreground), but just blur them. Now the subject gets the first look and the most attention, and the colorful, interesting background is still there, but it's blurred. Some of Bryan's photos are great examples of this:


http://the-digital-picture.com/Pictures/Picture.aspx?Picture=2008-12-25_10-33-45


http://the-digital-picture.com/Pictures/Picture.aspx?Picture=2009-02-15_15-35-40


The reason why it's so fun is that instead of walking around thinking about how a scene/background will look when it's in focus (like you have to do with most wide angle lenses, especially f/4), you think about how it will look at f/1.4.

[George Slusher]

Daniel:


Good idea. Those are great examples. The first, of Bryan's daughter and her horse, hints at the problem one has to be aware of--"looming noses"--on the horse, not the girl! Children tend to have flatter faces than adults, so this is less of a problem with them and Bryan wasn't that close. (A 24mm would probably not work too well for close-up portraits.)


Many years ago (about 1978), an ad agency used the stable south of LA where my horse lived as a setting for photos of models wearing riding clothes. (None of the models--2 women, 1 man--had ever been ON a horse!) The photographer had extra shots left on the roll of film, so he took photos of a horse they'd used as a prop. Unfortunately, he was using a wide-angle lens (not sure what--he had a Hasselblad), so he got pretty close to the horse's face--head on. He sent the photos to the teenaged girl who owned the horse, who was quite disappointed, as her horse looked like a camel.


You do need a very fast lens to get good blurring at such a short focal length. I wish that I could afford the 24mm f/1.4L II! I do have a Sigma 30mm f/1.4--I'll have to try it this way. (I
got it and a 50mm f/1.4 to use for indoor horse shows, when the light
isn't good enough to use f/2.8 and I'm too close to the action to use
an 85mm f/1.8.)

[Dan Fleming]

I only own two lenses, but my Sigma 150mm Macro takes the cake, and probably would even if I had more lenses. At about the same price as Canon's 100 2.8 (non-L) it gives better background blur, further minimum focusing distance, and the same apeture. I love it, it hardly ever leaves my camera.

[George Slusher]

I only own two lenses, but my Sigma 150mm Macro takes the cake, and probably would even if I had more lenses. At about the same price as Canon's 100 2.8 (non-L) it gives better background blur, further minimum focusing distance, and the same apeture. I love it, it hardly ever leaves my camera.
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Good choice!


In case some folks aren't familiar with what leads to "blurring," note that the 150mm lens gives the same depth of field as the 100mm lens for the same framing/image size, aperture and subject-background separation (as long as you're not close to the hyperfocal distance). In order to get the same framing, you'll have to be 1.5x as far from the subject with the 150mm as with the 100mm. Here are some figures from DOFmaster:


100mm @ 4 ft, f/2.8: 3.98-4.02 ft, DOF 0.05 ft (hyperfocal distance 611 ft)


150mm @ 6ft, f/2.8: 5.98-6.02 ft, DOF 0.05 ft (hyperfocal distance 1374 ft)


Thus, a particular feature in the background will be identically "blurred" with both lenses.


There are differences, however, that make it look like the longer lens has "better" background blur. Bryan explains this very well with examples in his review of the Canon 180mm f/3.5L Macro lens. The longer focal-length lens has a narrower angle of view, which means that less of the background shows and, conversely, each bit of the background is magnified, which makes it look more blurred.


I've seen this, myself, with my two macro lenses--Canon 100mm f/2.8 USM &amp; Sigma 180mm f/3.5 EX DG APO (whatever all those mean!). The major advantage of the 180mm lens to me is the greater "working distance." The practical disadvantages are the weight (35 oz vs 21 oz), bulk (7.2" long vs 4.7") and difficulty in keeping it still. I need to use a monopod or tripod for macro shots with the 180mm much more often than with the 100mm. Of course, some sort of steady support is a good idea with ANY macro photography, but carrying and setting up a tripod in the field can be a real PITA. The good thing is that the 180mm lens works better with a monopod, in part because it has a collar.

[Daniel Browning]

The first, of Bryan's daughter and her horse, hints at the problem one has to be aware of--"looming noses"--on the horse, not the girl!

Agreed. For most human-sized subjects I find that that the closest I want to be is a three-quarters composition. By the way, another lens that can do all the same things that I'm talking is a TS-E, but they're not as good in low light and sometimes take more time/effort to use.