Canon 50mm f1.8

It is one of the highest rated and most often used lenses in the Canon line.

A lot of members here have it and there are a ton of examples of it in the Canon Rebel thread.

Edit: If you like shooting with primes you can't go wrong with it... awesome wide open and tac sharp at f/4, great for portraits and just general shooting. Not really wide enough to be a walk around lens, but still an awesome lens for low light.
 
"awesome wide open and tac sharp at f/4"

Thanks for the tip. You know, I read some stuff that the 1.4 has better bokeh, but I Just need it to hold me over until I am ready for a 50mm 1.2L (I don't want to invest in anything but an L series.) Until now I have been using a pentax 50mm 2.0 It is fast enough, sharp, and bokeh is good but no automatic options or focus assist so this should be a step in the right direction.

Are the OFH nice on this lens?

by the way I just purchased the 24-70mm 2.8L and should be arriving on friday. Rented it a few times and love it.
 
I was debating between the 24-105mm f4 with IS and the f2.8 24-70mm. The F4 can be viewed as a f2.8 in the sense that the IS will compensate for low light the way the f2.8 would and you will have a longer zoom range, but I wanted the shallow DOF and I figured that some day I am going to be getting the f2.8 70-200mm IS so no point in overlaping focal lengths.
 
These photos are nothing more then me fooling around with this lens but they were all taken with the 50mm 1.8...a steak, my dog and a ladybug...

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Rick, Thank you for those examples. I see that you shot the first one wide open have you noticed any optical vignetting when used wide open? I am not sure but the highlights on the right are sort of fading out (cat's eye effect) which is a result of optical vignetting.

P.S. really nice lady bug!
 
I usually don't shoot wide open...I was trying to eliminate the need for flash but it was actually quite dark...and I had trouble getting a crisp shot...so the representation isn't perfect...but I haven't noticed any vignetting.

These were corrected a little and I applied some lighting effects...so don't see the falloff as a lens shortcomming...the bokeh is amazing and its very sharp...for $80 dollars I don't see how you can go wrong.
 
I don't have many saved on my host site but I came across another. Not sure what you are looking at or what abnormalities you are looking for so hope these help...

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Even at f/4 you will get good bokeh. That said, the 50mm f/1.4 is a bit too soft for me wide open and the f/1.2 I have only shot with once on a 5D. At 1.2 the DOF is way too shallow for my tastes and the image is pretty soft. It is also really heavy for a prime, much moreso than the comparable Nikon 1.2's that I have seen. That said, by f/2.0 that 1.2 is tac sharp... this is opinion, I didn't do any comp. tests, just shooting a wedding where the 5D and 1.2 was given to me. I wouldn't turn it down, but I wasn't crazy about it.

I am still a huge fan of 2.8 zooms. A great one if people are trying to save money is the 24-70 f/2.8 from Sigma. It has great color and bokeh and is CHEAP.
 
Jeremy Ordan said:
A great one if people are trying to save money is the 24-70 f/2.8 from Sigma. It has great color and bokeh and is CHEAP.
Click to expand...

Hey, thanks Jeremy for the info! I have been wanting the Canon L series version of this lens for a while now but at $1200.00 bucks, its gonna be out of my price range for quite some time...and the kit lens with the XTi sucks.

egg-I will see if I can find anything else with a back lit area out of focus. If i can't I'll just take a few shots and post em.
 
At home I have some A/B with the 24-70 f/2.8 from Sigma compared with the 28-70 f/2.8 from Nikon (Nikon's sharpest and best regarded mid range zoom). At f/2.8 wide open the Nikon has a tad more sharpness in the corners, but otherwise at all other focal lengths they are almost impossible to tell apart. The only difference is that the Nikon has AF-S which is Nikon's silent instant focusing, whereas the Sigma does not have HSM built in (this is their version of AF-S). I never found the focus to hunt and considered it the best lens produced by Sigma in a non-HSM lens. Plus it is like $300. For full frame users (5D) is is great because 24mm is really wide, for crop shooters, like me (D200) then it is a perfect event, wedding, photojournalism lens but hardly ideal for wide shots (that 24mm being 36mm is just too small) but it is better than the 28mm-70mm.

Plus it is lighter.

That said, it is the only knock off that I constantly would sugest over the first party lens because it is 95% of the first party lenses (the Canon L included) and it saves your $1000.
 
Jeremy Ordan said:
At 1.2 the DOF is way too shallow for my tastes and the image is pretty soft.
Click to expand...

I have used the canon 50mm f1.0L. It is a crazy fast lens but not usable at f1-f1.8unless you are in a tight situation. Extremly hard to focus and there are technical issues at those apertures such as optical vignetting (cat's eye effect on OFH) and it even has a problem that the OFHs towards the edges of an image get obstructed by the camera body itself due to the unusually large aperture. I would imagine this would happen with the f1.2L as well. So really the 50mm L series aren't great quality wide open but they start performing really well as low as f2.0 and have the benefit of extreme low light in extreme situations. Here is an example of the highlights being obstructed by the camera body and optical vignetting which is causing the circular distortion.

_MG_0912.jpg

Notice how the OFHs aren't a geometric shape. This happens even at f1.8 and it's an L series lens! The cat's eye effect doesn't apply because it is actually being cropped by the camera body. It would normally happen towards the edges of the image.
 
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