Prime Lens and The Sweet Spot
Category: Photography
As an amateur photographer, I’m constantly gathering new bits of information. Thought I would share my latest discoveries from the past week:
1) Beginners Should Consider a Prime Lens
First off, there are two main types of lenses out there. The prime lens which has a fixed focal length (i.e., no zoom) and the zoom lens.
I currently own an 18 to 55mm zoom, which is the standard lens for the Canon 400D. For my second lens, thought I would try a prime. The main reason is that everyone seems to agree that prime lens produce sharper images. I want to produce those higher quality images to justify my expensive SLR camera!
Second reason for choosing a prime has to do with learning composition. I’ve read on a few sites now how people recommend that beginners start with a prime as they help to teach you how to compose a shot. Basically, the prime lens forces you to “zoom in with your feet” instead of just turning the barrel on a zoom lens.
I tried this theory out this past weekend by keeping my zoom fixed at 50mm for the entire afternoon. And after this brief test, have to say that I agree. Having to physically move myself around to get certain shots, helped to make them better. Getting in close changes your view of the situation and will usually lead to a whole new perspective you never would have tried if you were standing still with a zoom.
As an example, think this was my best photo of the day. Don’t think I would have come in this close to the wall if I hadn’t given myself that “fixed 50mm length” restriction.
More info:
Prime Lenses vs Zoom Lenses
Prime vs Zoom Lenses - Which are Best?
2) Set your Aperture to the Sweet Spot
I’ve already learned how the Aperture setting on your camera affect the depth of field. For example, shooting a close up of a flower at f5 will keep the flower in focus and blur the background. Shooting the flower at f32 will keep the entire scene in focus.
So from these types of examples, I just assumed that you would always want a high aperture when shooting a landscape. Made sense that if I want to keep the whole scene in focus I should always bump up the aperture to f32.
But! then I learned about the “sweet spot”. Most lens produce their sharpest image when the aperture is set somewhere in the middle (about f8 for example). And this now explains why some of my past landscape shots came out blurry.
As you can see in this photo, my aperture was set to f18 and the mountains are blurry.
More info:
Brilliant! Just the sort of thing I was hoping you’d post about. I’ve forwarded your link onto my father as a great set of tips on digital SLR photography. Keep it up.
Very true on all counts Dennis, but I should pick you up on a couple of points. Prime lenses are sharper than zoom lenses, but people should bare in mind what they are going to do with their photos. If they are just going to put them on flickr which is usually a fairly low resolution, then that extra sharpness is lost. I think a lot of people don’t consider the end use of their photos - if you’re going to present them in print, or blow them up, etc then that extra sharpness is far more apparent.
Also, I imagine the blurry mountains are probably more to do with the high ISO (800) used than missing your sweetspot with your aperture. I don’t know that for sure though and it would be interesting to set up a real comparison to see how much difference that sweet spot really makes…your challenge for this week…? ;o)
@Mark
Cool - glad you like the post…
@Jason
Regarding the sharpness of primes, I’ll take some comparison shots when I get mine - and see if we can spot the difference in the Flickr versions.
And yeah, think I need do some comparison shots for this “sweet spot” too! : )