Nail-biting stuff

Earlier this week I posted a shot of Irish soccer legend John Aldridge sitting in a corporate box in Croke Park as Ireland played Italy last Saturday night.   I was in the adjacent box thanks to the subject for today’s photo, Paddy, a friend of mine and the production manager with the Galway Advertiser newspaper.

I’m sure I’m not along amongst the many photographers who read this site in having a wish list of equipment – cameras and lenses – that I would love to own.  My “if I won the lottery” list.  If you set about making such a list, or are lucky enough to be actually investing in new equipment, a series of decisions need to be made first.  The most obvious one, which many probably sub-consciously make is to decide between film and digital.  Most, but not all, go for digital, and many people may not even give film a second thought.  But nonetheless, before you can make that wishlist, consciously or not you need to decide which media you intend to commit to.

Next up is probably the Nikon v Canon decision, though for some you might bring Olympus, Sony, Panasonic, Fuji or any other manufacturers into play.  Assuming you’re going with an SLR then there are probably four contenders, but Nikon and Canon dominate.

Those two decisions are going to lead to the most difficult – what lenses to buy?  And again here, for many there is the choice of zoom versus prime.  A zoom lens is, as it suggests, one that can handle a range of focal lengths.  A prime lens, less clear from it’s name, is a fixed focal length lens.  I own two of those – the “nifty fifty” f/1.8 50mm lens, which every photographer should own, and the more niche 10.5mm fisheye lens.  But otherwise, my wish list is dominated by zoom lenses:  12-24mm, 24-70mm, 70-200mm, 18-200mm.

Prime lenses generally have an advantage over zooms in terms of sharpness – there are no compromises to be made during design and manufacture of a prime lens like there are for a zoom.   Often, they are also faster.  A fast zoom needs to be a bulky thing – not so much for a fast prime.  These two factors explain why many portrait photographers love lenses like the 85mm f/1.4.

But zooms have one big advantage – flexibility.  If you have just one camera body and one lens, with a prime you either have to reposition, crop, or just miss the shot if the subject isn’t positioned the optimal distance from the camera.  With a zoom you can probably recompose by just zooming in or out.

The photo above is a good illustration.  It was the very next image I took after photographing John Aldridge, and it was taken with the same camera body, and the same lens.  The first shot was taken with my 17-50mm lens at 50mm.  Had I instead taken it with my 50mm prime lens, I would not have been able to get this shot, a moment later, of Paddy nervously watching the game.  But with the 17-50mm lens I could just zoom out until the framing I wanted was available, which happened to be at a focal length of 34mm, and take the shot.

The lighting between the two shots is very different, and the camera already has the flexibility, with aperture priority mode, to handle that.  For the first it slows the shutter down to 1/15s; for this, with me shooting into the light, it changes it to a faster 1/160s.  It makes sense to me to use a lens on the camera that is as flexible as the camera is to allow me get different images from the same position in quick succession.

Had I used primes, I’d have had to go from a 50mm lens to a 35mm lens to get both these shots.  As a result I’d probably have missed this particular shot, and maybe my next shot would have required a 150mm lens to get an action shot on the pitch.  That’s either a lot of lens changing, or a lot of camera bodies.  And my wish list is long enough as it is.  That’s one of the reasons why it’s dominated with zoom lenses.