50mm Challenge
I have a 50mm f 1/7 Prime Lens. It’s a fast lens and provides a great deal of light. My other lenses are no faster than f 3/5 and, while they are good lenses (they take very nice pictures), there’s nothing quite like the image stored by a very fast lens (if you ever want to see the difference in picture between a ‘fast’ and a ‘slow’ lens, take a picture at 1/1000 speed to capture the swing of a baseball bat with two different speed lenses, and you’ll see – a slower lens leads to a noticeably darker, if not outright dark, picture).
Lately I have been taking a lot of sports pictures of my son’s baseball and soccer teams. This is how I truly discovered just how dark a 1/1000 speed picture with a f1:5.6 lens can be (granted, there is no need to take a picture at 1/1000 to ‘freeze’ the frame for a 7 year old swinging a bat, but the example remains valid). I’d love to be able to buy a 70-200mm f2.8 lens, but justifying that against a group of 7 year olds is a difficult justification. Yet, I do have a fast lens that has remained, mostly, in my camera bag unused (a 50mm lens isn’t ideal for sports photography, even with 7 year olds).
Therefore, I have decided to challenge myself to make full use of the 50mm lens. Unless I absolutely need to change the lens to get the shot I need, I am going to make as full use of the 50mm lens as I can. There was a time when a 50mm lens was the only one available to photographers, and they made very good use of it. I do plan to do the same.
Now, on a Sony a100, the 50mm lens has an equivalent focal length of 75mm, but still, I can make use of that.
The family and I went out on a field trip today. There weren’t too many good photo opportunities I could get too (there were many, but I had four kids in the van who really did not want me stopping every 30 seconds to snap another picture), but I did get to enjoy a nearby farm with a farmer walking his horse.
It was this lens, and this location, that led me to today’s photo of the day.
