Re: Trading blows (on paper)
R2D2 wrote:
dan the man p wrote:
As others have expressed, if you're going to go lightweight with the M, primes are the way to go. I recently got the Sigma 30 mm f/1.4 and found it perfect for 90% of what I do, which is taking pictures of family, friends, pets, etc. It's a natural focal length that is perfect for pictures of people, unlike the 22 mm, which is too wide for portraits. It's still small enough that I can take it pretty much everywhere, either around my neck or clipped to my belt. It now stays on my camera almost all the time. And at f/1.4, the low light capability and shallow DOF are far beyond anything you'll find in a compact camera. For me, this is well worth the lack of zoom. Of course, I'll still switch lenses when the situation calls for it, like if I need wide angle or telephoto.
It's amazing how versatile that focal length (range) is. Sometimes I think that I could survive with the (Canon 32) alone!
For many of us learning photography back in the SLR days (manual focus in my case), the camera came with a 50-55 fast prime as standard, and that's what we shot with most of the time. Zooms were pretty exotic back in the 70's, and most weren't very good. I shot with an SLR and standard prime (first an F2 58mm on a Zenith, then an F1.8 50mm on a Mamiya) for a couple of years, before supplementing it with a telephoto (200) and wide angle (28). It wasn't until the early 80's that I got my first zoom (a Tamron 28-50 for Canon FD mount).
Happy shooting!
R2
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As the length of a thread approaches 150, the probability that someone will make the obvious "it's not the camera, it's the photographer" remark approaches 1.
Alastair
http://anorcross.smugmug.com
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