This was my first lens and it took me a while to get used to it. Once I did, I fell in love with this lens. It has it's down points but the positives make up for it, no question.
To make this more interesting I will add in some pictures I have taken with the 50mm so you can judge for yourself.
Price:- Around £80
The price of the 50mm f/1.8 prime is by far the cheapest lens I have ever come across for a DSLR. No doubt, with attachments you can fit on older cheaper lenses but as for modern lenses go, this is a steal for how immense it is. To put it in perspective, a good friend and colleague of mine Oliver Halsey says to me once, that his 50mm prime was the sharpest lens he had at the time. Edging out thousand pound zoom lenses, for a mere 80 pounds.Considering this is an official Canon (or Nikkon) lens instead of a cheap manual focus third party lens, this is an absolute steal for the quality of picture you can take.
Handling:-
The handling is a good and and point for me. Let's get the negative out of the way. The focus ring is very small, extremely sensitive and not incredibly smooth to turn. This is my only major problem with this lens. If you want it for video then you have to be so incredibly smooth on your focus pulling. It seems that sometimes it's perfectly fine and other times it's very rough and difficult to focus smoothly. That combined with the small focus ring, makes it somewhat difficult sometimes. Positive sides trump all that though. First and most obvious thing: It is extremely small and light for a lens. This means you can take it all over the place and it wont weigh you down, won't take up much of any space in your bag and won't add much of any weight at all to the camera. Lighter camera = more steady hand-held shooting. It might be a bit small and light but that is also its strength in that it is a small and portable lens that does a whole lot for what you pay for it. The sensitive focus ring can be a plus if you're like me and like using manual focus and do street photography.
Performance:-
As you know, the lens can be opened to F1.8 which is very wide. The next best lens is the f1.4 and then the expensive luxury f1.2 lens. While build quality will differ, the F number is very similar. You will only really get a subtle difference in any vignetting and the bokeh will be a bit different because there are more aperture blades. F1.8 is very wide and lets a lot of light in. Being a medium telephoto lens it also allows for some shallow depth of field.... very shallow in fact. If you open the lens to f1.8, you're depth of field will be virtual as thick as a pencil. The bokeh is fantastic with this lens, absolutely beautiful. My only problem with it's performance is that it suffers from a huge amount of colour fringing.
Uses:-
Being a 50mm lens, it's very similar to how we actually see as humans. The images look very similar to me at least so they are great for things we expect to see normally in pictures. Faces, animals, bodies, people in general, plants and so on. Anything organic really that we expect to see in a certain way. Unless you want the effect of distorting the picture of flattening it to achieve a desired effect and play with the viewer, you are going to want something with this focal length. It;s flattering on faces and makes for some very great head-shots and body-shots.
Conclusion:-
Would I recommend you get this lens? Would it make a great first lens? Is it worth the money? Is it limited and have flaws? Do the positives outweigh the negatives? Yes. Yes. Hell yes. Of course. Hands down. I've been using this lens for a good while and have found out first hand it's flaws, limitations and strengths. It's fantastic for animals, people and nature. It's good but not amazing for landscapes and skies. It's awful for long range photography, you'll need a long lens for birds flying and shy squirrels. When I have the money, I am going to get the F1.4 lens just for the build quality and more professional look but that is a way off in the future. First I want equipment and more lenses so it will have to wait. There is no doubt in my mind that my little 50mm will stay in my collection for a long time to come.
