A couple weeks ago I wrote about Canon’s 50mm f/1.2L lens, which is probably the absolute best 50mm L glass lens you can get from Canon, without having to sell your soul or firstborn. It’s currently the fastest lens Canon sells, matched only by the equally beautiful 85mm f/1.2L. Not long after writing that post, I had the opportunity to rent the 50mm from Vistek for a weekend, resulting in some of the best shots I’ve taken with my 30D so far.
The job was simple: take pictures of a friend’s birthday party, and get paid for the results. This was the perfect scenario to test out the lens, seeing as I would run into a wide range of conditions and scenarios with which to test it out. One of the main issues with shooting indoor parties, particularly in banquet hall-type locales, is lighting. In scenarios like these, you have two options: work with a very fast, wide aperture lens, or compensate with appropriate external lighting.
The last time I shot a banquet party, I relied purely on the latter. The 18-55mm USM lens I was shooting with was simply the kit lens that came with my 30D, and had a less than ideal aperture of f/3.5. Coupled with my inexperienced inability to operate the external flash on my camera at the time, I wasn’t too thrilled with the resulting shots. They weren’t horrible by most standards, but there simply wasn’t enough fill lighting or depth for the results to satisfy me.
This time around, I had a nice combination of both. The 50mm f/1.2 has an a incredibly wide aperture, resulting in some of the best-lit indoor shots I’ve taken in a while, especially when taken without aid of an external flash. Another welcome surprise was just how sharp the images stayed when the lens was fixed at f/1.2. Usually, the wider the aperture of a lens, the less focus you can expect your pictures to have. This is simply due to the way lenses are designed, as they rely on spherical glass to focus the image. The smaller your aperture, the less light is being passed into the lens, which means less light is being diffused through the glass element’s outer curvature. But from my weekend of testing, I was pleased with just how sharp things remained at the lens’s widest aperture.
As mentioned previously, one of the things my 18-55mm lacked last time around was a suitable depth of field. The amount of depth you can acheive with a an aperture of f/1.2 versus f/3.5 is huge. For a bit of perspective, imagine how much of your image is in focus when shooting with a “regular” lens, or even a point-and-shoot. Usually, focus is maintained on your foreground subject, while the background is swathed in a nice amount of blur. With an aperture of f/1.2, your range of focus is reduced to but a few centimetres. The result can make for some incredible subject isolation, and some really creative shots, like those picture below.
As you can imagine, the combination of these two factors came incredibly handy in a party situation. Not only was I able to compensate for the notoriously bad banquet hall lighting, but create some very nicely framed and isolated subjects. The latter is particularly hard to do, considering just how busy party situations can become. Having a very shallow depth of field renders anything behind the intended subject almost nonexistent. But in a nice, pleasing way.
Based purely on this experience, I’d say I’m all for buying this lens during the Summer, once I’ve saved up a bit more money. It’s a beautiful lens, and exactly the kind of thing I’ve been looking for when it comes to both a shallow depth of field, and nice wide aperture. All that’s left to do is see how well it’s far less pricey cousins fare against it’s impressive f/1.2 aperture.
