Fast lenses for night action shots

sifro wrote:

Hi everyone, this is my first post here!

I would like to buy a new lens to take pictures of people dancing at local dancing events, so I will have to shoot moving subjects in low-light conditions, from quite a close distance.

I currently have an X-E4 camera with an XF27mm 2.8 which forces me to use incredibly high ISO and slow shutter speed.

I'm not 100% sure if I need autofocus, but for sure it would be nice feature to have (but only if it's super fast, otherwise I wouldn't use it anyway for this specific use case).

These are the lenses I was looking at:

Fuji XF 56mm f/1.2 - looks perfect, but I'm not ready to spend 1000€ on a lens at the moment;

Fuji XF 50m f/2.0 - everybody praises its quality and I love Fuji prime lenses, but i'm not sure it would be enough of an improvement from my XF 27mm f/2.8 in terms of light I can get in;

Viltrox 56mm f/1.4 - this is the one i'm currently thinking about buying. It seems to me that for 1/3 of the price, it doesn't lose too much compared to the Fuji XF 56mm;

Samyang 50mm f/1.2 - no autofocus (which I still don't know if it's a big minus or not), also the image quality I saw from a few reviews in Youtube didn't really convince me, but I read great things about this on the forum.

What do you guys think?

Thank you!

PS: also, as I don't have a portrait lens, I would also like to use whatever I'm going to buy as a portrait lens too.

Please post an example of "people dancing at local dancing events", that could mean a lot of different things. Very fast lenses typically come with a very shallow working depth of field which could certainly cause problems if your subject(s) are at close range and/or aren't always on the same plane. The larger the aperture/longer the focal length, the shallower the DOF, f/2.8 may indeed be the best aperture for the job and you will indeed need a very high ISO to maintain a shutter speed high enough to freeze the action.

I would be inclined to think the 50-140 f/2.8 would be the lens for the job, but it ain't cheap. Of your lens choices above, any could work, but I think the Fuji 50 f/2 or Viltox 56 would be the best choices if they are the correct focal length.