God love my 50 mm f1.8 lens; it is really, really, really the best thing I’ve bought this year and that includes the new car. This shot was taken well after midnight on an outdoor stage that had about 25% of the lights you’d optimally like to shoot under in a shitty lighting rig. Drop the f-stop down all the way, up the ISO to 1600, set my shutter to 1/15, and I even got shots of bands on the ground in the audience with almost no direct light. (I ran the gamut in shooting on Saturday: started with the kit lens in P at 100ISO, and finished off in M at f1.8 and 1600ISO. Such are outdoor festivals.)
There are things I wish it did differently, if only because it’s a full manual; I wish like hell there was a 50 mm that would auto-focus on a D60, and I rarely use it in daytime light because I’m too lazy to meter for ever-changing sunlight and if I’m willing to play, I can get the sort of depth of field I want with my kit, but it’s a wonder in low-light settings. And sometimes that lack of auto-focus can be fantastic — the 506, a notorious lighting pit of a venue that often runs unbelievably red, has recently become one of my favorite places to shoot, at least when I know the bands playing and can bully them into monkeying with the lights for me. In that space, with those lights, the 50mm gives me these lovely dreamy focused-but-motion-blurred concert shots that I’m so fond of.
I’m half-assedly shopping for my next glass purchase, and I think I want a midrange (somewhere between 28 mm and 105-115 mm) zoom with a low aperture — f2.8 is fine, I prefer to shoot at f4 and f2.8 if I can, to reduce the softness of the shots — that I can shoot in P for outdoor settings (it’d be an essential replacement for my kit lens). Doesn’t have to auto-focus on the D60 if nothing’s available, and I’m not married to Nikon/Nikkor lenses (my 70-210 mm is a Quantaray and I adore it), so other manufacturers are totally a go. Anybody with recommendations, speak up.
brand new kind of photography 