Lens advice

jimmynaetroots · 11 Jul 2014 at 20:54

Hi everyone.

I am just beginning to get into digital photography and I was after some advice. I have a Canon 400D body and a Tamron Aspherical [IF] MACRO AF 18-200mm F/3.5-6.3 XR Di II LD Lens at the moment but I am struggling to capture decent portraits of the family, especially indoors...

I have done a bit of reading which suggests that the Canon 50mm f1.8 would be a good lens for family portraits. I cna pick one up for £80 new, which is appealing to me. Before I bit the bullet, do you think this will drastically increase my chances to capture sharp portrait images, or should I be looking at something else.

Thanks for your help!

Grahame

D.P. · 11 Jul 2014 at 21:02

possibly, possibly not.

The 50mm is very nice for the money. On a crop body it is little tight for family portraits, great for head and shoulders but is too narrow to capture multiple people unless you step back a bit. 35mm will work a bit nicer for you in general.

the 50mm f/1.8 has a wider aperture which will allow you to get a shallow DoF and throw the background out of focus giving a strong separation between subject and background. this is desirable for portraits. The downside is you will have to try harder to make sure focus is OK.

The wider aperture also lets in more light so you can achieve a faster shutter speed which is good. However, you still might find that indoors is too dark 9espeically when the sun has set). In which case a flash bounced off the ceiling will give you better results easily.

The 35mm is preferable IMO but the 50mm is so cheap you might as well add it to your kit.

Sh4rkie · 11 Jul 2014 at 21:27

Indoors unless you have the benefit of lots of space the best upgrade would probably be retain the existing zoom and add some off camera flash (ocf) to start with.

Baron C · 12 Jul 2014 at 00:53

On my crop, I found for group shots the 35mm gets everyone in. Also means I need less space around me indoors to compose the shot.

Another option is to select 35mm and 50mm on your tamron and see which feels more your thing.

GAC · 12 Jul 2014 at 10:50

Grahame said:
Hi everyone.

I am just beginning to get into digital photography and I was after some advice. I have a Canon 400D body and a Tamron Aspherical [IF] MACRO AF 18-200mm F/3.5-6.3 XR Di II LD Lens at the moment but I am struggling to capture decent portraits of the family, especially indoors...

got a few examples and state what you find wrong with them, and also what settings you where using be it auto or manual. as personally i cant see why you couldnt get usable portraits with the above lens. sure its not the dogs knackers for portraits but hell you can do em with the kit lens and get usable images.

jimmynaetroots · 12 Jul 2014 at 15:17

Thanks for all the replies guys, just caught up with the thread now. I actually bought the 50mm lens this morning before seeing these. I have had a little play and so far, my images are coming out much sharper under the same conditions I was struggling with on the other lens.

I am impressed with the sharpness of this shot, even though I over did it with the shallow depth of field.

Still need to get my head around shooting on aperture priority mode. Making that leap from the auto mode is definitely daunting at first!

G.