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Zooms or Primes better for 5D and which ones ?


jon_kobeck1

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I use a 5D and do alot of street stuff, documentary etc. I was using the 24-702.8L but that thing is like a brick. I was thinking of selling it

and buying primes, or a lighter smaller zoom. any advice? My problem is I am hung up on L glass, I am afraid to buy inferior lenses. I know

for 1k I could buy 3 canon prime non L lenses or one 24mm L lens.

Advice please

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I don't think you will find a better smaller zoom that you would be happy with to replace your lens. I have the 50mm f1.4 and like it, but would not give up my 24-70mm in place of it. But I do like having both. Perhaps you can keep your lens and get one prime.
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The thing about Primes is that you are constantly switching lenses inviting dust into your camera. You didn't say if you were shooting for pleasure or for profit. If you are shooting for pleasure Tamron has 28-75mm f2.8 that is extremely sharp compact and very light. For street stuff, I use the Canon 28-105mm f3.5/4.5 which cost about $250. It isn't as sharp as the Tamron, but it is allot sturdier. If you insist on "L" series lenses, then the primes might be you best bet, but that means you would probably have to buy 3 lenses to cover the range of the 24-70mm. This might take allot of room in your back pack.
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Buy a 28/2.8. Not a 28/1.8. Not 24L. Not a 35L. Put the 28 on your 5D and leave it there. Do not take it off for one

month. Do not use any other lenses or any other cameras for that month. Shoot 300 pictures a day, everyday. After

doing this for an entire month (yes, 9000 images with just one fixed lens...) decide what you need, if anything.

 

Honestly, Jon, I'm being a little sarcastic here, but not that much. From your portfolio, it's clear that you don't really

understand lens position. Shooting extensively with a single prime lens is really the only way to learn that. Ellis said it

best in your other post - don't let equipment get in the way of your photography.

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A few things...

 

First, L glass is not the only thing that will work, especially for street photography and double-especially if you decide to

use primes. In fact, if your goal in using primes for "street" work to lighten/shrink your gear then using L primes will be

counterproductive. These lenses compete with some of the Canon L wide zooms on the basis of size/weight. There are

some quite decent non-L lenses that will be smaller and lighter and will produce excellent images, especially for

handheld photography like you are probably doing in this genre. The 50mm f/1.4, the 35mm f/2 and a few others come to

mind.

 

Second, the question of whether to use zooms or primes is personal and there is not correct answer. I know a lot of

people use primes to shoot street, but others prefer zooms. I'm in the latter camp. I feel that I can react more quickly

and generally get more effective compositions with zooms. My primary lens is usually the 24-105mm f/4 L IS (and IS is

helpful here, too) on a 5D, but I also like to use the 17-40mm f/4 in certain situations, including in very crowded areas.

 

Third, while YMMV it seems to me that a super large aperture lens can sometimes not be the best thing for street. Often

- at least the way I shoot - I'm working quickly and I don't always have time to carefully find focus points and so forth.

For this reason, using a really big aperture with its very narrow DOF makes it less likely that I'll get the focus I want -

while using a somewhat smaller aperture, even at the expense of shooting at a higher ISO, is going to work more

consistently.

 

Dan

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Here's a cheap way to start finding out whether you'd be happy with primes. Spend $80 on an EF 50mm f1.8. Compare it with the L zoom especially at wide apertures.

 

I have the 24-70 f2.8L and a handful of EF primes in that focal range. I generally find the primes more satisfying although you'd have suspected the price differential to indicate otherwise.

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I can't see that it makes sense as an "either one or the other" sort of choice. Granted, the L glass is heavy. There are lighter zooms, but they as a rule will not have the features that you bought (and paid for) when you got the L lenses. Mass, large apertures, and (to a substantial degree) quality are intertwined - as the song says "you can't have one without the other(s)".

 

You may want to get a smaller, slower IS lens as a walk-around shooter, keep what you have to use when you need it, AND buy some really nice, but relatively inexpensive primes (many of which AS primes will rival even the best variable focal length lenses).

 

There are, of course, some nice L primes, but try some of the cheaper ones first, I think you'll be surprised what you can get for a couple of hundred bucks.

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"My problem is I am hung up on L glass"

 

Getting over this problem will be the first step towards better photography. L fetish is such a silly and inhibiting affliction.

 

Many of Canon's cheap primes outperform L zooms. You've blown about $3k on equipment already and you haven't even tried a $75 lens like the 50 f1.8 or a $230 lens like the 35 f2 to work this out for yourself? Isn't this whole question misplaced anguish.

 

Check out Mike Dixon's work and see what he does with the somewhat maligned 28 f1.8.

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Jon, David Hurn says there are two basic controls in photography: where to stand and when to press the shutter.

"When the press the shutter" is moment. "Where to stand" is lens position.

 

Let's say you're photographing a scene. You can get really really close and shoot with a wide angle or you can back up

and shoot long. Obviously, any suitable mathematical combination of subject distance and focal length will include the

same elements in the scene, but which do you choose? Understanding that is lens position. There's no singe correct

answer. It's one of the intuitive parts of photography that - thankfully - can never be taught. Every needs to figure it out

one their own.

 

The problem with zooms is that lens position is very difficult to learn. Most folks are too busy wracking the zoom in and

out hoping to find something that looks alright. They never learn what a 35mm frame looks like, or a 50 mm frame.

 

I hate using myself as an example but I'm the only one whose work habits I know well enough. I shot with a 28 as my

only lens for my first year and half of photography. It worked for me and now I have 28 hard-wired into my brain. I know

before I look through the finder what I will see, both in angle of view and depth of field. When I wanted to 'get serious' I

traded the 28 for a 24 + 35 combination and spent the next 3 months swapping lenses instead of taking pictures.

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"The problem with zooms is that lens position is very difficult to learn. Most folks are too busy wracking the zoom in and

out hoping to find something that looks alright. They never learn what a 35mm frame looks like, or a 50 mm frame."

 

I pretty much completely disagree with this idea.

 

While I shoot primes and zooms, I firmly believe that for beginners the zoom is the better learning tool. If you want to learn

a particular focal length, and this can be a good exercise, you can do that on the zoom by setting the FL and leaving it

there. However, there are significant elements of composition that depend on being able to vary the FL and you can only

learn and understand them by, uh, varying the FL - either by using multiple primes or by using a zoom.

 

To use your "where to stand" variable, imagine a scene with a small central subject and a somewhat more distant

background. How do you want to handle the relationship between the subject and the background? With the zoom you can

control their relative "size" in the frame along with some aspects of DOF/OOF by moving forward/backward while adjusting

the FL to keep the subject the same size. The result is that the relative size of the background object changes relative to

the main subject. Can't do that with a single FL

 

And... for the beginner _fun_ is also a critical thing, and using a zoom is going to be, dare I say it, more fun.

 

Dan

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