Comments on: My Favourite Lens Is Also My Cheapest Lens – Nikon 50mm f/1.4G

By: Lönja Selter

Lönja Selter — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 18:54:00 +0000

I also love my 50/1.4, but for me its the most expensive bit of glass i have, and thats for one that has an incompatible AF to my d60…

works great with extension tubes :D
love it

By: Paul

Paul — Tue, 05 Feb 2013 02:43:00 +0000

I still am using my Nikon D70 and 50mm f/1.4D combination (yes D70, not D700 or D7000 … I tend to keep things for a while). I originally got the D70 with the better of the two offered kit lenses back in 2004 but added the 50mm a few years later. Since then, I have not taken it off of the D70. It is time to replace the D70. A friend will wind up with it and the kit lens. My photography skills (OK, maybe just aspirations) have progressed to a point to where the D70 is sometimes a serious limiting factor.

I am looking at a D600 or D800 and the 50mm lens will be used on whichever of these two camera bodies I get. This will happen when I am conviced that there is no more left focus issue with the D800 or no oil/dust problem with the D600 sensor. In other words, when Nikon gets their quality control act together. I would like to get a wider angle, perhaps a quality zoom or prime lense with image stabizaton so I could hand-hold the camera at slower shutter speeds.

Thanks for the encouraging and interesting article!

Paul

By: Stan Rogers

Stan Rogers — Tue, 26 Jun 2012 11:57:00 +0000

A lot depends on how you tend to see the world around you, and I’ve found that shooting with something that more-or-less matches what you’re seeing anyway makes getting vision to print/screen a lot easier.

Back in the silver halide days, my walking-around lens was a 90mm/2.5 macro (Tamron’s 90 has always been a superb lens, and the old, shorter 1:2-native Adaptall 2 version was still quite compact), and it suited my vision; a fifty always felt like “going wide” to me. Similarly, the “nifty fifty” on an APS-C camera fits me very well (although going to 60 would be better from a FoV perspective, losing out on two stops or so of shallow DoF isn’t worth the trade-off for me).

On a full-frame Nikon these days, I’d be likely to use the almost-invisible 85mm/1.8. Not only is it a good lens sitting around my personal sweet spot, it’s smaller and less intimidating/invasive-seeming than even the 18-55 kit lens (especially in the “D” version). That, too, is part of the charm of the fifty on a crop sensor: when you’re shooting people, you can get considerably more intimate before your subjects feel it.