Conventional wisdom states your money is better spent on a good quality lens than on the camera body. And for the most part it’s a very good piece of advice - something like the Canon 85mm f/1.2L will produce stunning images mounted on a 1000D body, whereas even a Nikon D3x will struggle to take decent shots with the 18-55 kit lens in anything other than favourable conditions. There is, however an curious anomaly in this trend that occurs at precisely fifty millimetres.

By and large telephoto lenses are easy to design, optically but require some very large [read expensive] elements if you want a fairly wide maximum aperture. In contrast wide angle lenses have to bend light much further and apertures can only be so large without the use of sophisticated [read expensive] optical corrections.

The humble 50mm, once the standard ‘kit lens’ bundled with new SLRs happens to sit at the crossover point. The focal length is long enough to employ a simpler non-retrofocus design, which is tried and tested, with inexpensive elements keeping the manufacturing and assembly cost down. As a result you get a very large maximum aperture and good optical performance for what is relatively little money.

And mounted on a full frame 35mm body the selective focus is sublime…

MG

What do you do when it’s past midnight on a cold dark Christmas evening & there’s nothing on TV? Put on a 100mm 1:1 macro lens and look for something to point it at! For me the Christmas tree with all of it’s lights and decorations was an obvious target. This is the first time I’d been taking photos for the sheer fun of it in a long time. I was using a macro lens so that nothing would be too close or far away, giving me complete freedom - a principal which dictated my entire approach to the shoot.

If you don’t have a dedicated macro lens there are several options to getting close focus - extension tubes, screw on close up adaptors and finally reversing a telephoto lens.

Other than that you only need a tripod - camera shake is exacerbated by working close to your subject and the relatively dim output of the fairy lights is not going to get you anywhere near hand holding territory! I had the aperture wide open at f/2.8 and this obviously has the effect of reducing depth of field, but the main reason I was shooting wide open, however, was so that I could simply look through the viewfinder and see exactly what I was getting (without having to keep pressing DOF preview). Shoot into something hollow such as a Christmas tree and there will be detail at many of depths, selective focus allows you to pick out what you want and pretty much defines the shot.

I was simply moving the camera around, turning the focus ring and just seeing what looked interesting. The best thing about self assigned projects (or rather, messing around) is that there are no constraints and no penalty if it all goes wrong. It’s something I’m going to force myself to do more often from now on as it not only will it help brush up on technique but it’s good to relax and recharge creativity (you can tell we’re getting to that resolution making time of year again). That’s pretty much it except to say read on to see the results, and do give it a go yourself!

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