Nifty Fifty has arrived

After waiting for about two weeks, I finally got the Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 II lens from Merkle Camera on Wednesday. As mentioned in my previous post about the lens, Merkle did not inform me that my item was back-ordered until I sent in an e-mail. Their usual policy is that orders are sent out within 2 business days and, in the event that there was any delay, they’d notify me directly. Not only did they not notify me, their response times were abysmal.

Onto the lens

I took a bunch of photos over the past two days and I’ve attached a few of them to this post. I’m still playing around with apertures to see what works best in what situation so I imagine that my photos aren’t the greatest.[nggtags gallery=2012_04_19_20 template=compact]

There are a few things that I need to get used to

1. Lack of zoom – With the kit lens (Canon 18-55mm IS), I could pretty much just walk around wherever and if I needed to zoom in/out, I’d just turn the lens and be done with it. With the 50mm lens, the only zoom available to me are my own two legs.
2. Crop factor – Since I’m using the Canon Rebel T1i, there’s a crop factor of about 1.6x. What this essentially means is that I’m getting an 80mm field of view from a 50mm lens. If I had a full frame DSLR, whatever goes through the lens would be whatever is captured on the sensor. However, since the T1i has an APS-C sensor, it’s unable to capture all of the image. As a result, the image that shows up on the sensor is a cropped version of the full image, if that makes any sense. For more information on crop factor, here’s Wikipedia’s page on it.
3. Aperture – Prior to using this lens, I mainly used the shutter priority mode on the T1i so I haven’t really learned all there is to learn about apertures. Based on the photos I’ve taken today and yesterday, I’ve noticed that, as I go closer to an object with a large aperture (f/1.8), my depth of field gets extremely thin. This results in a bunch of photos where only a small area of the photo is focused, instead of the entire object.

Nifty Fifty is Nifty

Having said all that, I’m really enjoying using the lens so far. I’m still getting photos that are out of focus or photos whose DOF is too shallow so it’s something I need to work on. I haven’t used it for portraits yet but, from what I’ve seen, it can do an amazing job (Photography on the Net’s Nifty Fifty photo thread [1] [2]). For $119.00 + tax, I’d say it’s probably one of the better value for money lenses out there.