If you only have a prime and need to zoom, just walk closer to the subject…

Isn’t that one of the infamous Ken Rockwell gems, along with not needing fast lenses because excellent high ISO performance and VR make them redundant? 🙄

along with not needing fast lenses because excellent high ISO performance and VR make them redundant?

Well, unless you want the narrow DoF, he’s quite correct. I get significantly more ‘keepers’ on my 24-105 f/4 L IS lens than my 50 mm f/1.8 when taking street shots at night without a tripod.

The 35 mm f/2 IS I’m about to pick up should give me the best of both worlds, however…

Well, unless you want the narrow DoF, he’s quite correct.

Um, so he isn’t correct then?

Well, unless you want the narrow DoF, he’s quite correct.

Not necessarily. No matter how high your ISO goes you can always use more light. Plus the argument about image stabilisation only applies if no-one’s moving in your shot. I can take pictures down to 1/8 on my camera but not of my kids playing!

Have a 50mm Nikkor f1.8 prime. For £50 (or whatever they are now) you really can’t go wrong. Great little lens.

Having one ‘do-it-all’ lens on the camera can be a real bonus in some situations, like travelling or situations where having loads of kit/changing lenses a lot isn’t practical. But you can have a relatively lightweight outfit with say a 24/28mm, 50mm and a short telephoto like 105/135mm. But everyone has their own preferences and style, so different strokes and all that.

+1

I use a bag like this

Which means I choose three lenses to go out with. Last time it was the 50mm f1.4, the 14-42mm and the 9-18mm.

You can take fabulous photos with only one focal length, of course. But you can only take one kind of fabulous photo

H C-B took all kinds of fabulous photos. He just didn’t need loads of different lenses to take them with.

He took fabulous photos with only one field of view though.

There’s nothing wrong with only having a prime, but you don’t get the option to create different effects with different fields of view. I don’t see that as inferior.

Ditto on the 50mm. They don’t cost much secondhand, if you don’t like it stick on ebay!

Not necessarily. No matter how high your ISO goes you can always use more light.

Yes, it’s nice, but ISO4000 on my 5DII has less noise than ISO200 on my 450D. So, I have ‘more light’, or at least, more opportunity to take noise free shots due to the sensor’s superior noise handing with an f/4 zoom lens than I would even if I were using a wide open prime on the 450D. Obviously, a prime on the 5dII would be better still if what you needed was fast shutter, but I’m already streets ahead the best an older, cheaper camera could manage with a fast lens, by having decent high ISO ability.

Plus the argument about image stabilisation only applies if no-one’s moving in your shot. I can take pictures down to 1/8 on my camera but not of my kids playing!

But, if you have a higher ISO, you can have a faster shutter speed. For the same reason as you’d be able to with a wider aperture.

Taken together, his point still stands. Unless you need the narrow depth of field, high ISO usability solves the ‘need more light’ for higher shutter speed issue, and in my experience in very dark scenes where the only shutter speed concern is to avoid camera shake, IS on my L-series lenses buys me more stops than equivalent non-IS prime would. I have some excellent night-time shots of a fair taken at ISO4000 hand held. No prime in the world could take them were it not for high ISO speeds. Likewise I have some very high quality sunset / dusk landscapes taken hand-held where a few years ago the only way you’d have achieved them was with a tripod. High ISO and IS made these situations so. A wider aperture would not have captured the images I was going for.

Edit: I’ll go further actually. I was at the Twelve Apostles a few weeks ago at sunset, and it was blowing an absolute hooley. I could brace myself against a fence or wall and high ISO and IS did the rest. The people with tripods weren’t having much luck at all by comparison. And again, a wide aperture is exactly what you don’t want when you want a good DoF for a landscape.

Much to the disgust of many I now find it necessary to extol [some of] the virtues of another brand that seems invisible to people at times, yet one that was an incredibly big player at one point

With a Pentax DSLR one can fit any K mount lens with no adapter (so that’s going back to about 1975) and it will be stabilised (in body stabilisation)…

Obviously, a prime on the 5dII would be better still if what you needed was fast shutter, but I’m already streets ahead the best an older, cheaper camera could manage with a fast lens, by having decent high ISO ability.

Depends on what you call cheap. Less than 200 quid would buy a 2nd hand Pentax K-x (2009 tech) and a 50mm 1.7 M lens or similar (just look on Ebay UK). It would be about a 1/5 of the cost of the 1000 pound second hand 5d MKII body and give it a real fright..

Yes thats FF vs crop sensor.. perhaps that makes it even more interesting 🙂

Have a look on http://www.dxomark.com/ for the sensor performance…

It would be about a 1/5 of the cost of the 1000 pound second hand 5d MKII body and give it a real fright..

I have the advantage of not needing to spend that, having already got a 5DII, which, is 2008 technology 😉

..and you can use lenses at the field of view they were designed for rather than the weirdness you end up with using ff lenses on apsc.

..and you can use lenses at the field of view they were designed for rather than the weirdness you end up with using ff lenses on apsc.

what weirdness? you will be left with the centre which should be incredibly sharp – you just have to take into account the crop factor

hardly a big deal

I’m already streets ahead the best an older, cheaper camera could manage with a fast lens, by having decent high ISO ability

I’m not arguing for wide aperture INSTEAD of high ISO. I’m saying that BOTH are useful, of course. And that the idea that high ISO removes the need for wide apertures is silly. They both do different things.

Much to the disgust of many I now find it necessary to extol [some of] the virtues of another brand that seems invisible to people at times

Hehe.. I’d never do that.. 🙂

And that the idea that high ISO removes the need for wide apertures is silly. They both do different things.

They do, which is what my first post on the topic said, which you probably missed whilst trying to a be contrarian as usual. However, the high ISO ability of a modern dSLR buys you many more stops of ‘light’ than even the widest prime would in normal ISO ranges. So, unless you want the narrow depth of field (a point I made quite clear), for shooting in low light you’d be better off with high ISO than a prime. A prime would help further, but in recent years, the steps forward with ISO buy you many more stops of light than the difference between f/4 and f/1.4.

Throw in IS, which is usually only found on slower zooms, and you will get much better low light results than if you didn’t have high ISO ability, or IS, but did have a prime.

a good DoF for a landscape

That’s not quantifiable, just because it’s a ‘landscape’ doesn’t mean it has to be sharp from 2ft-?

No such as *good* DoF just as there is no such thing as *narrow* DoF (as per Molgrips).

DoF is either shallow or deep. Field of View is Narrow or Wide.

A good DoF is subjective and depends on what the intent of the photographer is trying to achieve. Yes a deep DoF is *generally* used for landscapes and shallow *generally* used for portraits for example but that does not mean either is *good*.

And to be totally pendantic (and in reference to Molgrips statement), yes if you want a deeper DoF then good high ISO handling is more useful than a wider aperture but if Focal Length is the same (and consequently Field of View) then you are best with a prime at high ISO than a zoom at high ISO.

For like for like shooting a prime is very nearly always the better option but you lose the convenience.

And yes 9/10th’s of the photo comes from the photographer regardless of the equipment being used.

Zokes I’m just airing my opinion as you are yours.. hopefully you won’t interpret it as some sort of war/crusade

If one is just starting out, they’d probably be better spending the money on the glass. Having an expensive body but average lenses seems a bit pointless. Not saying you have this.

Forgetting low light for a minute. The OP’s question was open ended. Should I buy a prime?

A prime will almost certainly beat the zoom at the same focal length which I think is some of what Molgrips might be getting at as well as other things. Its madness to think someone would be always shooting at the widest aperture all the time. Not many lenses are sharpest at their largest aperture.

The cleaness of ISO is a property of a given camera. These cameras are like computers. Generally speaking a better one will be out in the next year or two with some ISO gain. You might still have the same glass. So the benefit of the new body might not be fully realised because the glass was never invested in.

Throw in IS, which is usually only found on slower zooms, and you will get much better low light results than if you didn’t have high ISO ability, or IS, but did have a prime.

Again life exists beyond the realms of Canon and Nikon. Stabilisation can be found in the body and therefore applicable to any lens that fits the given mount. So this stabilisation premium per lens is not always a problem – it depends on what system you run. These other brands include Pentax/Sony/Olympus to name a few which all have in-body stabilisation systems…

The OP has Nikon so yeah he will have to consider that. Other people might not though.

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For the record I did have a Canon Powershot compact many moons ago and I’ve also owned Olympus and Panasonic cameras in the past.

And now I fly off on another rant (I’m sure in another life I was destined to work for Pentax marketing – which I believe are criminally underrated and have been badly marketed) 😆

Many will think I’m mad (probably some truth in that). I changed to Pentax for tank like build quality, in body stabilisation, range of great primes (new and legacy – four of six lenses I own are primes) and also various weather resistant lenses that allow shooting in adverse conditions as this US marine demonstrates in Afghanistan (his blog is very interesting regardless of what camera brand you shoot with):

Many people on this forum would not limit themselves to two brands shopping for considering a bike or bike components…

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What was the question again, OP – Yeah go get yourself a prime!

and forget about everything and enjoy whilst the rest of us squabble

I’ve just got myself another old manual focus lens, a Porst 55mm f1.2. I’m using it on an aps-c Nex-7 but with a focal length reducer so it behaves like a full frame lens.

The light is crap so I can’t do much with it at the moment but I thought this one was funny (for complete lack of depth of field)…

That’s not quantifiable

Which is why I didn’t.

Though, I think it would be safe to say a ‘good’ DoF for landscapes would very rarely be using an aperture wider than f/2.8?

Lets get this sorted once and for all. This is what I meant when I said that Ken Rockwell’s statement about high ISO and IS reducing the need for fast prime lenses:

Low light, fast shutter required: High ISO and / or prime lens. But a modern SLR will get you a higher clean ISO than the equivalent stops bought by a fast prime lens over a slowish zoom

Low light, shutter just fast enough to avoid camera shake: High ISO and IS. In my experience, the IS on my 24-105L f/4 IS returns fewer blurred shots than my non-stabilised 50 f/1.8

Narrow DoF: Hooray! A prime is the only lens that can do this (which is why I own several)

Low light, shutter just fast enough to avoid camera shake: High ISO and IS. In my experience, the IS on my 24-105L f/4 IS returns fewer blurred shots than my non-stabilised 50 f/1.8

Which is why I have a stabilised FF body and a 50mm f1.4 😉

You’re not limited to just stabilised zooms anymore, for aps-c I have a stabilised 50mm 1.8.

my 24-105L f/4 IS returns fewer blurred shots than my non-stabilised 50 f/1.8

it’s resolving power is poor and doesn’t have a flat field though. which isn’t ideal for some landscapes, for some people, on some cameras in some shooting scenarios and is possibly detrimental to producing technically good*images.

*as judged by some people but not a given de-facto set of parameters that are universally acknowledged.

Not sure if there is a Nikon equivalent, but the Canon 24mm f/1.4 L ii is really excellent for landscapes especially when the light isn’t great.

Can’t be bothered to check all the above so sorry if it’s been said but on a non-ful frame camera a 50mm works as 80mm – ideal portrait lens but good for other too obvs. If you’re into landscapes get something wider as well as maybe a 100mm with a macro which would allow for more creativity.

Which is why I have a stabilised FF body and a 50mm f1.4

Now we’re talking… The 35mm f/2 I would have bought yesterday if the staff in the shop had any interest in making money (I’ll buy it online as I’m less likely to spend 30 minutes being ignored there) has IS.

Jeez, this thread reminds me why I avoid photography forums.

Ahem, In somewhat related news, there’s a couple of really nice lenses in the classifieds right now… 😀