What can you do with a cheap lens? 1: outdoors

G Dickson wrote:

Many thanks Alastair for your reply. I hear what you are saying, I am not against plastic per se, and the 35mm does sound good and gets great reviews. Weather proofing at times is really important as I live in a country that at the right time can be really wet - Zambia. But am from the UK originally. You demonstrated the ability of the 50mm for sure. And you made a great case for the 35mm. I just hope we get more options and more choices soon.

Agreed. And good luck keeping your equipment dry! I lived in Houston for five years, which is one of the most humid places in the US, and gets massive quantities of rain. There were three floods in the five years we lived there. During the first one, I saw people paddling a canoe down the street that intersected with ours. Luckily for us, our house was a little higher up, so the the water only covered our front lawn, but not the actual house (very few houses in Houston have basements, for obvious reasons). One of my colleagues at Rice University (where I was teaching at the time) had his whole house raised three feet after the third time it got flooded. It cost a fortune, but luckily for him, he had a joint appointment at the medical school (which has pots of money). One of our former neighbours finally abandoned their house, after the fourth time it flooded, and now lives on the 20th floor of a downtown apartment building. They might be just about safe.