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.

My recommendation would be the 18mm f/1.4. I think if you try anything that frames tighter than the 27, the loss of depth of field will push you right back to f/2.8. The 18mm has fast and accurate AF, and image quality is good enough at f/1.4 that you wouldn’t mind using it wide open. You’d probably need to get a bit closer to your subjects than you do with the 27, but that could create some interesting perspectives which, I think, would work well. You won’t be able to get too close, of course, because of the action and the loss of depth of field. Two extra stops could be the difference between a marginal shot and a keeper, but there is no way you will get the ISO down under 6400.