New lens: Nikkor 50mm 1.8D AF
Posted by Jorge Bernal June 06, 2007
It’s been almost a year and a half since I got my first DSLR camera, a Nikon D50. It’s a nice camera and I’ve managed to take a bunch of cool pictures with it, but the kit lens (Nikkor 18-55 3.5/5.6G) is sometimes not enough. Since I take most of my pictures indoors at conferences, parties, concerts,… I needed a more appropriate lens for this.
So, after my last trip I went to eBay and got this awesome lens:
Some good features:
- It’s really fast focusing
- It’s very sharp (see example)
- It’s small and lightweight, perfect for travelling
Also, the fact that it’s not a zoom forces you to move around subjects and experiment, helping you to improve your creativity.
You can check my 50mm test set on flickr.
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What a coincidence, I was just discussing this lens with a colleague yesterday, and I ordered one for my D80 last night. And now I’m even more excited about it after seeing your test shots…
You forgot one good side: It is a fixed lense which has by design a better picture quality compared to zoom-lenses.
This is a good choice!
Two thoughts occur –
Firstly, do you really need a fast lens for indoor work on a digital camera, given that they’re capable of much higher, and more importantly, adjustable effective ISO values than film ever was?
Secondly, Isn’t 50mm a bit on the long side on a D50? That’s about the top end of the standard 18-55 zoom.
Ewan, maybe but ISO 1600 results in a *lot* of noise. Also I forgot to mention other of the features of this lens: it’s relatively cheap
You’ll love it. I got one for my D70, and it almost exclusively replaced the (also great!) kit 18-70 one. http://shot.pl/1/125/hot-town-summer-in-the-city/ was my first shot with it.