Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 II

Recently, a good friend of mine, Fay, received a Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 II lens for her birthday. I had a play with it today.

The first thing you notice about this lens is it is tiny. It is the smallest, lightest and cheapest in the canon range. The big advantage of this lens over the standard kit lens is it is able to use a much wider aperture (f/1.8) that allows you to take photos with a faster shutter speed, which is great for low light photography and sports photography. Having a large aperture also allows you to have a small depth of field, which means that you can have one part of your image in focus, where as a small aperture allows you to have the whole field of view in focus.

The negative aspects of this lens are that it has a plastic mount, and rumour has it the focus isn’t very sharp at large apertures, but my eye isn’t trained enough to pick that up in the photos I have taken with it so far. It is also much harder to frame shots without a zoom, something that will take a bit of getting used to. All in all it’s an amazingly good lens for the money and I would recommend anyone with a Canon DSLR get one.