Tannin
Storage? I am Storage!
Cross-posted from another place because I thought some people here might be interested.
Some homespun rules of thumb, passed down from father to son for many generations in my family. Or possibly some rules that I make up as I go along - you decide.
Rule 1: For long-lens work, primes are better. When you are doing the sort of photography that needs a long lens - birds in particular, but also many other things - you are practically never as close as you want to be. If you have a zoom, you are practically always at maximum length anyway, and wishing it was longer still, so why not just use a prime in the first place?
For any given budget, a prime will always outperform a zoom. The same for any given weight or bulk contraint. In short, if in practice you are not going to zoom in and out (and with a long lens you don't), then there is no reason to buy a zoom, and every reason to buy a prime.
Rule 2: For shorter work - anything once you get into the long-normal, normal, wide, and ultra-wide categories, zooms are enormously more capable of doing what you want to do. These shorter lenses are easier to manufacture too, which means (to me) that while the 400mm class zooms are clearly not as good as primes, when you get down to 100mm and 50mm and 20mm and maybe even 10mm lengths, the picture quality a decent zoom delivers is so damn close to that delivered by a prime that the difference isn't worth worrying about. Buy the zoom and you can take a whole swag of different sorts of pictures. It won't cost you too much either: the big lens makers turn out so many zoom lenses in the wide to normal lengths that they are surprisingly inexpensive - and short primes are rare these days, which is no doubt why few manufacturers bother introducing new models or improving old ones. (When was the last time Canon introduced a new prime lens in the wide to normal range? A long, long time. In fact the only lens you could even vaguely put in this class would be the EF-S 60mm macro, which on a 1.6 crop body (the only sort you can use it on) is clearly in the mild telephoto class.)
Rule 3: Primes make you more creative. It's true! With a zoom you stand in one place and fiddlle about zooming in and out until you think you have a shot. (One dead-set giveaway that you don't really have a worthwhile shot at all is when you find yourself taking two shots from the one place, one zoomed in and the other zoomed out. London to a brick they are both destined for culling room as soon as you face reality and admit to yourself that they are rather pointless shots - scenes in search of an idea, not ideas in search of a scene.)
Lately I've been needing to do a lot of stuff in very poor light. When it gets bad enough, the 18-55 is the first to head bagwards, followed by my beloved little 10-22 - now there is a lens to dream with - and the seldom-used 60mm macro lens comes into play - at f/2.8 it's the fastest lens I own, and though 60mm is way too much for what I'm shooting (nature), it's that or get into the car and drive home.
And, you know, having to work with one focal length, and one at least three times longer than I'd usually use for these same places - I'm an ultra-wideangle junkie - really brings to the fore your most important bit of photographic equipment and makes it work both hard and productively.
(Most important part of your kit? The 60mm prime lens? Nope. Your brain - never, ever leave that behind when you pack your bag.)
Seriously, I really, really enjoy working with just the 60mm macro - close to 100mm in 35mm equivalent terms remember - and although it makes me sweat and swear and grumble about the light, and wish I had a Sigma 30mm f1.4 instead, or an optically impossible 10-22mm f/2.0, I actually start thinking hard about what it is I'm trying to achieve, and producing better pictures than I would have done with a zoom.
One day, just to see what comes of it, I'm going to go out, on a perfect day with perfect light, with just one prime lens and nothing else.
(Actually, I do that all the time with the big 500, but that's different. I'm talking about approximately normal focal lengths now.)
Some homespun rules of thumb, passed down from father to son for many generations in my family. Or possibly some rules that I make up as I go along - you decide.
Rule 1: For long-lens work, primes are better. When you are doing the sort of photography that needs a long lens - birds in particular, but also many other things - you are practically never as close as you want to be. If you have a zoom, you are practically always at maximum length anyway, and wishing it was longer still, so why not just use a prime in the first place?
For any given budget, a prime will always outperform a zoom. The same for any given weight or bulk contraint. In short, if in practice you are not going to zoom in and out (and with a long lens you don't), then there is no reason to buy a zoom, and every reason to buy a prime.
Rule 2: For shorter work - anything once you get into the long-normal, normal, wide, and ultra-wide categories, zooms are enormously more capable of doing what you want to do. These shorter lenses are easier to manufacture too, which means (to me) that while the 400mm class zooms are clearly not as good as primes, when you get down to 100mm and 50mm and 20mm and maybe even 10mm lengths, the picture quality a decent zoom delivers is so damn close to that delivered by a prime that the difference isn't worth worrying about. Buy the zoom and you can take a whole swag of different sorts of pictures. It won't cost you too much either: the big lens makers turn out so many zoom lenses in the wide to normal lengths that they are surprisingly inexpensive - and short primes are rare these days, which is no doubt why few manufacturers bother introducing new models or improving old ones. (When was the last time Canon introduced a new prime lens in the wide to normal range? A long, long time. In fact the only lens you could even vaguely put in this class would be the EF-S 60mm macro, which on a 1.6 crop body (the only sort you can use it on) is clearly in the mild telephoto class.)
Rule 3: Primes make you more creative. It's true! With a zoom you stand in one place and fiddlle about zooming in and out until you think you have a shot. (One dead-set giveaway that you don't really have a worthwhile shot at all is when you find yourself taking two shots from the one place, one zoomed in and the other zoomed out. London to a brick they are both destined for culling room as soon as you face reality and admit to yourself that they are rather pointless shots - scenes in search of an idea, not ideas in search of a scene.)
Lately I've been needing to do a lot of stuff in very poor light. When it gets bad enough, the 18-55 is the first to head bagwards, followed by my beloved little 10-22 - now there is a lens to dream with - and the seldom-used 60mm macro lens comes into play - at f/2.8 it's the fastest lens I own, and though 60mm is way too much for what I'm shooting (nature), it's that or get into the car and drive home.
And, you know, having to work with one focal length, and one at least three times longer than I'd usually use for these same places - I'm an ultra-wideangle junkie - really brings to the fore your most important bit of photographic equipment and makes it work both hard and productively.
(Most important part of your kit? The 60mm prime lens? Nope. Your brain - never, ever leave that behind when you pack your bag.)
Seriously, I really, really enjoy working with just the 60mm macro - close to 100mm in 35mm equivalent terms remember - and although it makes me sweat and swear and grumble about the light, and wish I had a Sigma 30mm f1.4 instead, or an optically impossible 10-22mm f/2.0, I actually start thinking hard about what it is I'm trying to achieve, and producing better pictures than I would have done with a zoom.
One day, just to see what comes of it, I'm going to go out, on a perfect day with perfect light, with just one prime lens and nothing else.
(Actually, I do that all the time with the big 500, but that's different. I'm talking about approximately normal focal lengths now.)
