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I have a Facebook page with absolutely nothing on it. I put up one photo and discovered it stripped my EXIF data, so I deleted it. I have a couple of Flickr pages, the one below and another (http://www.flickr.com/photos/camera_clicker/ The Toronto Harbour photo on page 17 was the first night photo I took, using my new hand held light meter in February or March of 1975. It’s nice to see it there, I misplaced the slide!) with 1700 photos on it, as well as my own web page (http://cameraclicker.com) with about 3000 photos.
The lens you choose depends on what your objective is. I have the Canon 50 mm f/1.8 because it is cheap plastic that does not weigh anything and it goes well with the Rebel T2i, that is also pretty light. I have the 18-55 kit lens, as I said before. I have others as well. Some get a lot of use, others much less, mostly due to weight and what I shoot.
I set up a couple of coffee cans and shot them through some different lenses this morning using the Rebel T2i, which should give you a very good comparison of a few lenses.
The camera is about 8.5 feet from the first coffee can. It is about 3 feet to the second coffee can and another 3 feet to the backdrop, so 14.5 feet from camera to backdrop. I posted the full size photos on Flickr so you can click through and see the lens and exposure details. Lighting was done with a Bowens strobe into an umbrella and then exposure and white balance were adjusted in Adobe Camera Raw to get the white coffee can exactly the same in all photos, which was easier than dialing in the exact light power for each f stop.
Sigma 85 mm at f/1.4
Sigma 85 at f/2.8
Sigma 85 at f/5.6
Canon 70-200 f/2.8 IS USM L at f/5.6, at 80 mm
Canon 70-200 at f/2.8 IS USM L at f/2.8, at 80 mm
Sigma 18-250 at f/5.6 at 50 mm — this is a lens I use a lot with the T2i
Canon 18-55 at f/5.6 at 53 mm
Canon 50 at f/5.6
Canon 50 at f/2.8
Canon 50 at f/1.8
Regarding auto vs manual focus, the digital bodies and some of the lenses were designed with the intention that you use auto-focus. When they expected you to use manual focus they put a split prism into the focusing screen so you could tell when focus was achieved. All the digital bodies I have seen just have a plain ground glass like focusing screen. The 18-55 and 50 f/1.8 lenses have virtually nothing to grab, to focus. You turn the filter thread! Not manual focus friendly at all! By comparison, my other lenses have decently sized focusing rings where you can find them without looking, and many also have full time manual override so you can focus manually without turning off auto-focus. Manual focus is great for macro, for a bird in a tree where the branches keep focus from finding the bird, or for focusing for a location you expect your subject to arrive at and remain very briefly — like a racing car coming around a corner and popping into view before screaming past you. Generally the camera can focus much faster and more accurately than I can, and in servo mode it can track moving subjects better than I can, so generally I let the camera worry about focus and I just set the focus point I want it to use.
@blueeyes, here is an example of using cheaper gear for a portrait and it not turning out very well.
Keep in mind, I 100% knew that this would probably be my result beforehand tonight. It’s not “profesional” quality work, and is really just a nice snapshot. I went out into the wilderness, and knew I’d have to wade in my rainboots across an almost-dry river, over mossy stones, and was not going to being my 5D Mark II or my 70-200 f/2.8 lens, because those are VERY expensive and I cannot risk them getting wet or damaged if I were to slip on the rocks. If my Rebel or one of the kit lenses gets damaged, it won’t stop me from doing what I do, and that is why I took them on my hike.
This photo was shot with a T2i, and the 55-250 f/4.0-5.6 telephoto kit lens. It’s a really crummy lens for any portraiture to be honest, but for doing nature shots, it’s not terrible. Especially on a crop body, that focal length is really magnified and I am able to get a shallow depth of field even at f/5.6 and some nice bokeh. But this lens hardly ever takes a sharp photo, especially in low light. Plus, the Rebel can’t perform well over around 400 ISO. After that it gets pretty noisy/grainy. This was shot at 800 ISO.
I did edit it in both Lightroom and Photoshop, where I removed noise, increased the exposure (it was pretty underexposed, my mistake), and adjusted the color temperature and saturation. I made it look as good as I possibly could.
If you view some of my other work on Flickr, you’ll see that some portraits are tack sharp even on the Rebel. It is because I used a high-quality lens.
BrownEyedGirl89, on a hike I would take my Rebel T2i as well. Not because I am worried about damage but because it is relatively light and if hiking I would expect to have to carry it.
I don’t have and have not used the EF-S 55-250 f/4-5.6. It does not mate with a teleconverter so that makes it a non-starter for me. However, if it is not sharp, that would be a second reason to not have it.
I take exception to a couple of things you said:
Especially on a crop body, that focal length is really magnified and I am able to get a shallow depth of field even at f/5.6 and some nice bokeh.
A crop body does not change the focal length of a lens. It does not affect depth of field, regardless of what some defective DOF calculators may indicate. The reason little point & shoot cameras and cell phones have such deep depth of field is their lenses are very short. The apparent length of their lens is due to packing far more very small pixels onto their tiny sensors. They take “crop” to the extreme, making very short lenses seem long by cropping with a very, very small sensor. Look at the PowerShot ELPH 330 HS, for instance: 4.3 (W) – 43.0 (T) mm (35mm film equivalent: 24 (W) – 240 (T) mm). If they actually gave you a 240 mm lens, you could get very shallow DOF, but since they actually give you a maximum of 43 mm, you really have to work to get shallow DOF. Really, since they give somewhere between 36 and 50 mm, it should not be too hard to get shallow DOF if you could open it up enough, except the crop is such that you couldn’t get a person’s face in the frame when working at the distances you would use for 50 mm on an SLR.
Plus, the Rebel can’t perform well over around 400 ISO. After that it gets pretty noisy/grainy. This was shot at 800 ISO.
I suppose it depends on what you want to use the photo for and maybe the circumstances around taking it. If the choice is between having a photo taken at high ISO or not having the photo because you can not get enough shutter speed, I would take high ISO. Also, the Rebel may not be quite as good as a 5D Mk III, but compared to a G11 it is a star. In fact, it can take a very good photo at high ISO settings I can’t even set on my 1Ds Mk III!
This is straight from the camera, no noise correction. It was taken on a cruise ship. The speaker is on the ship’s stage in a single spotlight and the theatre was pretty dark as he was showing photos of Alaska to support his talk. You can tell from the settings that there was not much light. It was taken with a Rebel T2i and Sigma 18-250 lens. At ISO 6400! The focal length was 250 mm and the shutter speed was 1/90th. You’ve got to love image stabilization! Aperture was f/5.6. Is noise objectionable? Not to my mind. Certainly not unless it was going to be printed on a billboard and in that case, most viewers would be too far away to see the noise anyway.
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