Yesterday I finally bought a new lense for my Canon EOS400D. Already a couple of months, the kit lense delivered with the camera, started to bother me. It was slow, the aperture was not stable along the entire zooming range (ranged from F3.5 wideangle till F5.6 in utmost zoom) and generally it had low quality, especially noticeable when taking photographs in dark rooms. Additionally, when photographing you especially want to play with the field of depth, which was not possible with the kit lense I had. An example: when taking portrait photos you mostly want the subject’s face to be in the focus of attention and fade out all distracting backgrounds. By using a big aperture you can do exactly that: sharp face, blurry background… so field of depth is one of the most important effects a photographer can play with; portraits mostly low field of depth, landscapes great field of depth…varying it might provide you with a range of artistic effects.
However, not being able to play with aperture values with my kit lense and especially the problems in low light conditions when I was in Ancona, made me consider buying a new lense. This was already the plan when I bought my camera in the first place, but when I bought in December, I first wanted to experiment a bit before buying a range of lenses for a large amount of money. Now that I’ve been using the camera for almost half a year I already have a better idea of what I want to achieve with the camera and a bit better idea of my photography interests. So, I decided it is a good time to start looking around and maybe even buying something. Especially, with the upcoming holiday season in mind…
And lo and behold, zoom.nl magazine, one of my favourite photography magazines, came up with a special issue about single lense reflex cameras and also had several reviews of lenses. Already soon I decided I did like the range of my kit lense (18-55mm), which is quite allround, ranging from wide angle till the lowest zoom range, ideal for most city, landscape photography and even portraits it can do quite well. One review in the magazine now was especially aimed at replacing the low quality kit lense and soon I found my eyes wandering to a Tamron lense. The Tamron 17-50mm F2.8 ended up in the top three of the review and after doing some reading on the internet, it became clear to me that this could be the lense I was looking for. I was not too expensive (especially compared to the canon lense in that range) and even competed with those lenses in the higher price range. Soon I made my decision, I will buy it. So yesterday, we drove up to the media markt Herzogenrath, which has a reasonably big part aimed at photography, and I found myself buying at least that one.
But the Tamron lense was not the only one I wanted to buy. I think as a amateur of hobby photographer most of the pictures you take are either holiday photos or portraits. Holiday photos mostly consist of landscape or city photos which the Tamron can already handle well. However, two kinds of lenses remained; a decent zoom lense with a range starting where the Tamron’s ended (50-150mm, 70-200mm, etc.) for photographing from a distance and a portrait lense for photographing people.
While I did not consider the zoom lenses very much yet, I did have a look at a couple of portrait lenses. A friend of my father’s advised me to buy a 135mm lense he used with his analog camera (equivalent to a 85mm for a small frame Canon EOS400D), very much suitable for portraits he said and also you would be able to keep some distance from your subject, either to take sneaky pictures (like I mostly do) or not to make your subject very uncomfortable (which is why I take sneaky pictures in the first place, they are more natural). Conversely, Hai, a guy I met at the summerschool in Fréjus, advised me to buy a 50mm F1.8 portrait lense, which allows you to photograph people from the waist on and also was quite cheap (around €100). Therefore, being already at the media markt, I also had a look at these portrait lenses.
Luckily they had the Canon 85mm F1.8 and I could already try that. Amazing how big the magnification of that lense was, I stood about 1.5-2m distance of my father and was not able to capture his entire face. Joking, I told him that now I was finally able to photograph his face at its real size, portraying the big head he has ;). Unfortunately, the guy at the media markt, which was very helpful by the way, was not able to find the Canon 50mm F1.8, but he also told me he did not like that lense very much, because it was cheaply build, which you could expect with that price. Instead, he gave me a Canon 50mm F1.4 lense, which was just breathtaking…the brightness of the image, just the sheer quality…it really made me doubt, should I buy the 85mm or the 50mm, I could not decide…so I postponed buying it…we’ll see about that, first I want to get some more advice…especially since these lenses are not cheap at all.
Finally I had a look at a new Sigma zoom lense, 50-150mm F2.8 HSM, which was also quite impressive, but without having read anything about zoom lenses I decided not to buy it. So next weeks I will be doing a bit more of research about that, but I’m already very much satisfied with the Tamron I bought. Keep an eye on my flickr site to see some photos taken with the new lense.
