What is your favorite lens?

[havoc315]

I guess I really don't have a "favorite". I only have one lens that I don't really like (Sigma 12-24).

I've been considering this lens... may I ask why you don't like it?

 

[MarkBarbieri]

It might be a decent lens for someone shooting APS-C, but on FF the corners are awful. It has the worst CA of any lens I own. Distortion is also pretty bad on it. I suppose that it is by far the best 12mm rectilinear lens you can get for a Canon DSLR, but only by virtue of being the only 12mm lens.

 

[havoc315]

It might be a decent lens for someone shooting APS-C, but on FF the corners are awful. It has the worst CA of any lens I own. Distortion is also pretty bad on it. I suppose that it is by far the best 12mm rectilinear lens you can get for a Canon DSLR, but only by virtue of being the only 12mm lens.

Yes, I'd be using it on full frame Sony --- And as you said, it's the ONLY 12mm rectilinear zoom. How do you feel the corners and CA are at 16mm?
Because my only other options are the Sony Zeiss 16-35, which costs 2 to 3 times the price. My current Minolta 17-35 -- soft corners and bad CA.

So if the 12-24 at least performs well in the 16-24 range... better than my old Minolta 17-35.. may be worth saving money compared to the Zeiss.

 

[havoc315]

Thanks Havoc - great idea for a thread. One of these day's I'm going to step up to your Minolta 200mm 2.8!

This is an EXTREME crop, wide open at 2.8...

untitled-21.jpg by Havoc315, on Flickr

I don't own any "new" truly professional lenses. But it's hard for me to imagine anything better than this 28 year old lens. Yes, a newer lens would have silent internal focus, etc. But in terms of resolution and IQ... Hard for me to imagine anything better.

 

[boufa]

I don't have any photos to share right now but my favorite lens is another Sigma.. 150-500, of course I shoot mostly wildlife and birds. My main travel lens is the sigma 18-250 macro.

I drifted over to Sigma a few years ago, when I looked in my bag and realized that the nifty 50 was the only canon lens I was still using.

 

[SkaGoat]

A great thing about the older lenses like these on Micro 4/3 cameras is they were originally designed for 35mm film.

The 4/3rds sensor is much smaller than that, so it uses the centre 50% of the lens (where it's sharpest, and less likely to produce vignetting or barrel distortion).

My Canon DSLR does not stop down to meter, it's wide open until it's actually acquiring the shot (Unless you're pushing the Depth-of-Field Preview button).

 

[Groucho]

My Canon DSLR does not stop down to meter, it's wide open until it's actually acquiring the shot (Unless you're pushing the Depth-of-Field Preview button).

I don't think you understood. Your modern camera and modern lenses don't need to stop down to meter because the camera decides what the aperture is and can adjust the light coming in to correct the difference. On early auto-aperture SLRs where the lenses had aperture rings, the lens would relay the chosen aperture to the camera through a series of contacts, allowing it to know what the lens would stop down to.

Back in '59, they had none of that. You figured out exposure on your own. The camera didn't know what aperture you chose; there is zero communication between the camera and the lens.

Using such a lens on a modern camera means extra work for the photographer - you need to either shoot in full manual mode, manually entering shutter speed and ISO to match the lenses aperture, or shoot in aperture priority and leave the lens stopped down all the time, which will give correct exposure. This is the same no matter what camera you mount the lens on - these old M42 screw-mount lenses can be mounted on a wide variety of DSLRs.

Because of the lack of communication, I will sometimes use the copyright field in exif to note which lens I'm shooting with, although the focal length is also recorded due to my entering it when turning the camera on to help tune the image stabilization properly. Focal length alone doesn't help with you're shooting with a variety of 55mm, 105mm, 135mm, etc M42 lenses!

 

[kbnovak]

Nikon 400 2.8 without a doubt.

 

[KCmike]

Nice images.

 

[kbnovak]

Nice images.

Thanks KCmike!