Canon produces three 50mm standard lenses: The f/1.8, f/1.4 USM, f/1.2 L USM (50mm prime). If you’re in the market for a really high-end 50mm, then you’re likely only reading this review for sport.
I’ve now tried both this lens and the f/1.4. The f/1.4 is a terrific lens, without a doubt. This lens focuses slower than the 1.4, and is obviously less sensitive when shooting in low light. That said, it performs quite well for me, both indoors and out.
Generally speaking, it makes a great portrait/candid lens. You can fill the frame without having to crawl on top of your subject(s). Bokeh is good. Colors are bright when shooting outdoors and/or with decent lighting. Indoors, I’ve been producing some very cool shots at ISO 400/800.
If you’re looking for a daily shooter that you can leave on the body and not worry about, this lens might be the one. Buy it, use it, beat it up, break it and you can replace it with three more before you match the price that you would have paid for a single f/1.4.
[This review originally appeared on Amazon.com.]
I’m relatively new to dSLR photography and on-line photo sharing circles (an infrequent Flickr user at best), and have more or less settled on the decision to build my on-line photo catalog on Zooomr. As a result, I’m constantly being exposed to new features, as well as new ways to use existing features. The following are some observations based on my experience to date.
First things first: Zooomr is in desperate need of some type of community-driven help and/or discussion forum. You guys are doing some really great work. Our inability to discuss technical issues, create discussion groups, and generally socialize sans the inherent constraints of mediums such as ZMail and comments is going to become a show-stopper. Soon. And support aside, given the heavy focus on geography and relative proximity (to other users, based on GeoTags) in the interface, some type of community-driven outlet would be the next step towards something like, say, being able to invite users to a room or thread directly from a geotagged photo. Imagine, being able to effortlessly find other Zooomr users near you and with the click of a link invite them to the next local meetup.
Upload issues: I have a decent connection to the Internet (Verizon DSL, 768 Kbps). About half of my uploads fail. I think. Near as I can tell, the data is being sent. The length of time that data is transfered over the me-to-Zooomr socket is about what I’d expect it for a single image transfer (because of this issue, I don’t bother uploading more than one image at a time). Once the data transfer subsides, instead of the typical ”Now processing N of N images . . . ” message, it just sits on the “Receiving . . . ” page indefinitely.
Empty sets: I’m starting to think that this is some type of batch-processing scheme that goes astray every now and again, but eventually makes its way back home. For no reason that I’m able to discern, some of my sets randomly show up empty for a period of time, and re-appear fully populated at some point shortly thereafter. I’ve seen this issue manifest itself with other users’ sets as well.
Trackbacks: Don’t get me wrong, trackbacks are great. I want to know who’s keeping track of and linking to my images. That said, I don’t necessarily need to see http://google.com/reader/view/garbledgooklonguid, or links to other sites that presumably crawl Zooomr tags en masse and link once to each image. Or something like that. A way to filter trackbacks would be great.
More to come as I gain some additional exposure to the interface and features. And all else aside, Zooomr is proving to be a joy to use. I’m looking forward to Mark III, and all that it promises to fix and enhance. Keep up the good work!
Update (14 Apr 07): E-mail uploads don’t seem to be working, either. This used to be a separate post in the Asides category, but the Asides category was kinda dumb.