photo_chick
Knows a little about a lot of things, a lot about
- Joined
- Mar 1, 2007
50-100 would be considered by many to be a telephoto zoom. especially on a crop camera. But it's one of those middle lenses that gets categorized in different places by different people. There is different groups of lenses and the numbers that put a lens in one group or another aren't set in stone anywhere. Generally telephoto is considered to be anything over 70mm but with a crop body some consider anything over 55 to be telephoto. Like most things when it comes to photography it's about more than what the specs say.
How fast a lens you have, meaning the ability to get a fast shutter speed in low light, comes from a combination of a long focal length, aperture and lens weight. F/2.8 is fairly fast when you're at 50mm but it gets slower as your lens gets longer and heavier. The question is how slow is too slow for you? How steady can you hold a heavier lens? And of course, what is your personal shooting style because it always comes back to that.
There's also different ideas of what low light and night shooting are and the lenses everyone recommends will be biased by their interpretation of what that is, along with their personal style. In the end you can't base what you buy only on someone elses recs or you're going to end up with a lot of lenses that are not right for you. I get the urge to run out and buy a bunch of lenses to cover everything. But it's really counterproductive until you learn how you shoot. And that can only happen with time.
