Nontrivial Exercises

Vigilant

More of my first pics with my new 50mm f/1.8 lens…

Light at f/1.8

One thing I’m going to start writing more about is my deepening passion of photography. I bought a Digital SLR a few months ago, a Nikon D50, and that just took me to the next level of excitement and commitment to pursuing this light-capturing endeavor.

Today I bought my first add-on lens for my D50, a Nikon 50mm f/1.8 prime lens. More on this lens in a moment, but first my motivations for purchasing this one.

I have been exclusively using the Nikon 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6G kit lens. It’s very lightweight, can give a nice wide angle at 18mm and zooms in enough at 55mm to capture some action shots somewhat far away.

However, the smallest aperture of f/5.6 at 55mm this lens can do makes it very difficult to capture scenes in low light, many indoor situations or to provide a shallow depth of field at a longer focal length. Since I don’t have a real flash - just the pop-up flash on the D50 - I don’t have very good means of providing extra controlled lighting.

I have been reading / learning about various lenses, from the very nice writing of Ken Rockwell (see his review of this actual lens), from the Nokonians podcast, and several other sources and came across the Nikon 50mm f/1.8D lens. It’s around $110 ($115 at Adorama or $109 at Amazon) and I just couldn’t believe I could get a lens with such a wide aperture and great sharpness (by all the reviews, some even say this is Nikon’s sharpest lens, period) for such a small price.

Perhaps the very inexpensive price tag is due to the fact that 50mm is somewhat an awkward focal length. It’s not wide enough for landscapes or capturing big areas, and it’s not long enough to zoom in very far and capture sports action across a big field (or closeups of birds in a tree).

But a 50mm focal length on a DX-sized sensor is a 75mm effective focal length on a 35mm or full-frame camera. You can do quite a lot with 50mm - it’s not a bad length for portraits for example. Plus, it’s all I can afford right now and it’s got an aperture of f/1.8!

It’s just amazing what you can do with a larger aperture - you have so many more options of how to use the light. I also love the way this lens renders the out-of-focus areas when using a very shallow depth of field (i.e. a big aperture).

This quality of out-of-focus rendering is called bokeh and is largely a matter of personal taste, as I’m learning. I love the soft circles with no jaggies that I get with this lens - see the light on the bottom left part of the fountain in the picture above.

I’m very excited and can’t wait to explore more of what I can do with this lens. If you have a Nikon DSLR and a few $20 bills and like to work with light, then I think you couldn’t go wrong with this lens.