I now have the Nifty Fifty

roderz88

roderz88

roderz88

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7 Oct 2010
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So I now have the Canon 50mm 1.8 MKII in my arsenal. So far I like it. It produces nice sharp images, even on my old Canon 350d. I have uploaded some sample shots on my flickr page (http://www.flickr.com/photos/roderz88/with/8391536665/) The images of the Autumn leaves and flowers at the top of the page are the ones taken with the 50mm

My only issue with this lens is that it have trouble focusing in low light, and when it does manage to auto-focus, it seems to miss its target, i.e it will front focus slightly. I did a search on Google and it seems that others have had this issue with it before. It just means I have to manually focus if I take photographs in low light conditions.

So my question is, how do you all like this lens?

I think my next lens will be the Canon 55-250 II IS. I traded in my old Sigma 55-200 (non OS) since it was just too soft a lot of the time.
 
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It's regarded as a good lens because its sharp enough and costs very little.

It probably will struggle with low light acquisition because it is a cheap lens, plus the 350D is getting on a bit. Are you shooting wide open when you are having issues? One thing to bare in mind if you haven't used large apertures before is that at f/1.8 you have a very thin area of depth of field, thus an image can easily look completely out of focus because the focus is not where you want it and then the depth of field is too shallow. Its worth either manually focusing as you have been doing, or using individual focus points or zones. So say if you are shooting a person, use the focus points to lock onto their eyes.
 
As Nexus says above, v important to lock onto the one bit you want in focus (eyes), but also I will share my experience with the nifty and explain why I eventually swapped it for the canon f1.4 USM. I had exactly the same issue as you, I found a lot of my shots would front focus, like 80% or more even in good light. I did a whole load of tripod mounted experiments and got the same results. One thing I did however also discover is that if I used live view (contrast detect focusing) even in lower light (indoors etc) it would focus sharp, the issue was only when using the view finder (phase detect focusing). I took my lens and camera in to be calibrated ( there is a good place near me that does this under canon warranty) and after 3 weeks of trying the guy in the shop said I should swap the lens for a new copy, which I did. The new one was no different so after more faffing around trying different things I eventually decided to check out the F1.4 USM instead. This lens is excellent and barely leaves my camera for portrait shots, in fact I use it as often as I can because it is by far the sharpest, most reliable lens I currently own. In the end I put it all down to you get what you pay for (although the 1.4 USM is not expensive, just a little more than the nifty). For me the justification for the extra spend was very easy, the sheer joy at not throwing out 80% of my shots of family events/ kids growing up etc was enough.
 
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