Your most "fun" lens?

[ShutterbugJohan]

My "most fun" lens is my 100/2.8 Macro.

[Rodger]

I'd have to say my nifty fifty is actually my most fun lens. I love getting [decent] bokeh. I have a hard time getting the same blur from my 70-200 f/4L even though it's really fun to use too. With my next $100 I plan on getting a lomo fisheye camera and I assume that will take the 50 1.8's place as most fun. Gotta have the fisheye for some winter snowboard shots! Good topic!


-Rodger

[George Slusher]

The EF 17-35 f2.8L on my 5D... I shoot from the hip a lot with this lens. It's not just about wide angle but the perspective that these wider angles create. It's shorter and lighter than my 28-70 f2.8L so shooting one handed can be done easily

Interesting! Those older lenses are still really good! (The current lenses are 16-35 f/2.8L & 24-70 f/2.8L.)


One note: perspective does not depend upon the lens focal length but solely upon the relative location of the camera and the subject. It may seem that a wide-angle lens has a different perspective than a telephoto lens, but, if the subject is the same distance from the camera, the perspective will be the same. What happens, often, is that people CHANGE the distance--they move in closer with a shorter lens to "fill the frame."


What the focal length determines is how much is shown in the image--the angle of view. If you take a photo with a 20mm lens and crop it to 40% in each dimension, it will look exactly the same as a photo taken from the same spot with a 50mm lens. Crop it to 10% of each dimension and it will look the same as a photo taken with a 200mm lens from that spot. (By "look the same," of course, I'm ignoring the difference in the number of pixels.)


Here's a demo. I had to "fudge" the magnification ratio for the last comparison, rather than using exactly 0.25. Even though the EXIF said exactly 100mm &amp; 400mm, the real focal lengths could be different. All the photos were taken with a 30D &amp; 100-400mm L IS lens mounted on a tripod. Exposure was AV auto @ f/8 &amp; ISO 100. The shutter speed was 1/250 for the 100mm &amp; 200mm shots, 1/200 for the 400mm shot, as it didn't have as much sky. <span style="text-decoration: line-through;"]By keeping the aperture constant, there's no change in depth of field. {Edit: insert sound of a self-administered dope-slap. The DOF does change with focal length, but the distance is so great--well past the hyperfocal distance--216 ft @ 100mm, 3455 ft @ 400mm--that any change would be hard to notice.} The autofocus point was in the middle, as I recall.


First, the scene at 100mm.











Now, compare the scene shot at 200mm"








with a crop of the 100mm shot (the magnification is a bit different--the lens reported 200mm but appears to be a bit less than that), plus the camera may have shifted a little bit.








Now, compare the scene shot at 400mm








with a crop of the 100mm image. (This time, I "fudged" the cropping ratio to get closer to the actual magnification ratio.)








Ignore slight shifts right/left &amp; up/down and minor differences in the magnification. Instead, look at the perspective--the relationships between objects in the image. Note that the perspective is the SAME in all the images.

[Daniel Browning]

Excellent demonstration, George. Thanks. Perspective is a pretty fundamental element of composition. It would be neat to see all the images cropped to the same field of view, too.

[Chuck Lee]

One note: perspective does not depend upon the lens focal length but solely upon the relative location of the camera and the subject. It may seem that a wide-angle lens has a different perspective than a telephoto lens, but, if the subject is the same distance from the camera, the perspective will be the same. What happens, often, is that people CHANGE the distance--they move in closer with a shorter lens to "fill the frame."

Come on George, your nit-pick'n.You use a wide angle lens which forces you to move closer to the subject to fill the frame which in turn changes the perspective. If I tried to shoot my son on the trailer bike behind me with a 100-400mm lens I might have gotten a blurry image of his face against a blue/gray background. That was hardly the "perspective" I was looking for.


Let me re-state: It's not just about wide angle but the perspective that these wider angles <span style="text-decoration: line-through;"]create. generate because of my ability to get closer tothe subject.


There, is that better? Geezze, I thought this was a thread about fun-lenses?


So, post some of those fun-lens pics already.....[] Not boring illustrations of cropped perspectives. LOL!!

[George Slusher]

Excellent demonstration, George. Thanks. Perspective is a pretty fundamental element of composition. It would be neat to see all the images cropped to the same field of view, too.

I'm not sure what you mean, except to also crop the 200mm shot to the equivalent of 400mm.

[Daniel Browning]

Yeah, I just meant having the 100mm, 200mm, and 400mm all right next to eachother.

[Keith B]

16-35 2.8L II


I like wide angles. I really like shooting at 35mm but then being able to get that ultra wide perspective at 16mm with flick of the wrist. The sharpness is very good and 2.8 is fast enough most of the time with the sensitivity of the 5DmkII.


My 24-70 is running a close 2nd. I love the versatility of this lens.

[George Slusher]

Chuck:


First, you just repeated what I said. Second, there is a common misconception that the focal length of a lens affects perspective, which is not correct. In art and photography, perspective has a definition: From dictionary.com:


"The appearance of objects in depth as perceived by normal binocular vision."


"The state of existing in space before the eye"


Thus, the way you use "perspective" in the second paragraph is not correct. The perspective would be the SAME, regardless of which lens you used.

So, post some of those fun-lens pics already.....[img]/emoticons/emotion-2.gif[/img] Not boring illustrations of cropped perspectives. LOL!!

As Daniel said, perspective is an important part of composition. That's one reason (not the only) to use lenses of different focal lengths. We could establish the perspective we want by choosing an appropriate location, then choose the focal length (and/or cropping) to control how much of the scene (field of view) to include in the image. Here's an illustration, two photos taken with my "fun" lenses.

















Notice any difference, aside from being taken from slightly different angles and shifted? (Plus, the second was taken 15 minutes later, late in the day, so there's a difference in the shadows.)


The top photo was taken at 10mm (Sigma 10-20mm), the bottom at 100mm (Canon 100mm f/2.8 macro). Since the the apples are nearly the same size, the bottom photo was taken from about 10x the distance of the top photo. That translates into a major difference in perspective.

[George Slusher]

16-35 2.8L II


I like wide angles. I really like shooting at 35mm but then being able to get that ultra wide perspective at 16mm with flick of the wrist. The sharpness is very good and 2.8 is fast enough most of the time with the sensitivity of the 5DmkII.


My 24-70 is running a close 2nd. I love the versatility of this lens.
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What body are you using?