Canon 50mm f1.8 STM

What's up everybody? Ted Forbes. Welcome back to the Art of Photography. In this video, we're going to talk about a 50mm lens from Canon that came out. This is the 50mm 1.8 STM. The interesting thing to me about this lens is the price point. You can get this for about $125 US. I got mine in the mail this week. I've had a chance to put it through some paces and check it out. I really do like it. It does have some pros and some cons. There's a reason that it has the low price point. However, I think you get a lot of bang for your buck. What I want to do is let's go over and let's get up and close so we can check it out. I also have some images I want to show you today. Let's get going on the Canon 50mm 1.8 STM. This is the Canon EF 50mm F1.8 STM lens. This is actually the third lens in the 1.8 range that Canon has produced. The original was one of the first that they did. There was a version 2 that was out for years and years that was an incredible deal. I had one. This is actually the third version. It's got a couple upgrades on it that I want to talk about. Comparing this to the last version, which I was very familiar with, the one cool thing about what Canon has always offered in a 50mm 1.8 lens is that they're made of plastic parts. Essentially, you're going to get a cheaper lens price-wise, but they still offer a very decent lens that has pretty decent sharpness and is a good 50mm lens. I have seen a couple people talk about the fact that this lens is less plastic-y than the version before. I'm not sure I would go that far. You can see it here. It is very plastic-y in nature. It does feel more solidly built, and I will say that. The biggest difference, too, is they do use a metal mount now instead of a plastic mount, so that is kind of an upgrade, too. But I would still say that if you are looking for a 50mm lens and you are on the go a lot and you're in situations doing photography where your equipment is going to sustain any kind of level of abuse, I would not recommend this lens because it is made of plastic. I will tell you, my last lens, I was moving and it fell out of a camera bag and shattered, and so they really are a little bit fragile. But the flip side of that is they're very lightweight, and that's why some people desire these. They're easy to throw on a camera. You don't add a lot of heft to it. They're fairly shallow in terms of depth, and they work great. Optically, this is pretty much the same optics in this lens as in the previous version 2. It uses 6 elements in 5 groups. The biggest difference here is the aperture blades. The last lens had 5 aperture blades, and they have upgraded this one to 7, which actually is a little bit nicer. So what you're going to see in that is when you're using a really wide aperture, you have a very shallow depth of field, the out-of-focus areas are going to be a little bit smoother. Anytime you have little points of light in there, they're going to round off a little nicer, which will be really cool. And as well, when you're using smaller apertures, I knew people that complained that you could actually kind of see the aperture blades in various areas in the image. Moving to 7 aperture blades does solve some of that. A lot of what this STM technology is is what they call a stepping motor, and that's what that abbreviates to. So the idea behind a stepping motor is that if you have a camera that supports AI servo in live view, so in other words, if you're going to shoot video on this and you want a lens that's going to be able to use the servo motor to keep up, that that's what this lens is designed to do. The Canon 5D Mark III does not support autofocus in live view the same way, but if you're using a T4i or one of the newer cameras, I doubt that's fixable with a firmware update. But to be honest, and I do use my 5D for video production quite often, I don't really like to use a lot of autofocus. There are occasions where I do want to use autofocus, but it's really only mainly when I'm shooting this show, and the Sony have a very quiet autofocus, and that's why I prefer that system. One thing that I don't like on here is that Canon tells you this is a silent lens, and it is not. You can definitely hear it moving in here. And that is a little bit of a bummer, because if you are going to use this for video, and you're not going to be able to hear it on here, it's definitely quieter than the shutter would be, but if you're using it for video, it's so close to the camera that it's going to pick up on the microphones. And so, I don't know, I think if you want that for a video application, either you're not relying on the camera audio, or you're going to do something different. There is another drag about this type of setup too, is the way that the focus ring works, this is not a manual focusing ring. And so let me show you, if I go all the way out to manual focus here, and I'll do this. So when I turn it, it's actually using a technology here, so as I turn it, it's electronically moving it, and you can see that the front element does move out. Now here's the problem that I can't stand when you use an electronic ring for your focus. Once I turn the camera off, and I throw this in my camera bag, it's dead. It needs to be powered to bring the lens back. That's a problem, because if you throw this into your camera bag, you could jam that up, and there have been cases in other lenses that are similarly designed, where you could actually damage the autofocus motor. So one thing you have to do is actually power it back on, make sure it's in manual focus mode, and you have to bring it back yourself. The other thing I don't like about that, is that I don't like the feel of this when I'm using manual focus, and I do use manual focus quite a bit personally. And this doesn't feel, I don't have a feel of where this is, or it's just kind of awkward to me. It's not the end of the world, but I just don't prefer that setup. And I like to use manual focus sometimes for still photography, quite often for video photography, sorry, for video usage. This is just not an ideal setup. It's not a complete deal breaker, it's just not desirable, in my opinion. However, when you are using autofocus, the autofocus is very accurate, it is very quick. To go full on out, I mean, it's not the fastest lens in the world, but I haven't timed it, but it actually does work, and you can kind of hear it whirring right there a little bit, because you do hear the motor inside. But anyway, it does the job, it does it quick. You know, if you set up autofocus points and you're doing still photography, it locks in pretty quick. There's not a lot of hunting and seeking going on, and it works really well. And so, you know, for that, I think it's actually a very good deal for a lens. So anyway, let's go back out, and I want to talk a little bit more about this, and if I think it's worth buying or not. We're going to move over to Lightroom, and I want to look at some images and talk about some of the performance aspects of the Canon 50mm STM lens. And what you're looking at here is just a sheet of text. I'm a member of a Beer of the Month club, and they send this out with their beers. And anyway, this is kind of pretty much the closest focal distance that you're going to be able to get with this lens, which is a little over a foot. And what I was looking for here is I wanted to see some of the focal distortions of the lens, and also look at edge sharpness, see if there's any contrast issues. And I think it's pretty apparent that you can see what they are here. Right in the middle of the lens, it seems to be the contrast is spot on, and things are at their sharpest, and things get a little blurry, particularly with text, once you get towards the edges. This is pretty much normal for a lot of lenses, especially at this price point. But even expensive lenses, when you're shooting wide open, this is just something that happens with the lens. So it's not unusual, and it's not really a complaint against it, but I wanted you to see what that looks like. If you compare this to the same shot, and this was done at f11, you can see that for the most part it goes away, with some exceptions when you're really close to the edges. But it's much better than it was wide open. Another interesting thing, too, that I want to show you is, you know, many of you probably know that Lightroom offers lens correction profiles, and when I enable it for the Canon 50mm, you can't get things back in focus. And so if you're shooting something that's particularly technical, you know, where focus even at the edges is clearly a need. And you can see that it tries to fix the vignetting and contrast as well. And you can bring a little of that back, it overshot it a little bit, and I probably do have a little bit of control. But, you know, understanding the performance of any lens that you're using, I think, is important, and it's kind of cool to do some test shots like these to see where that sits. If you do need to do something more technical, and this is the lens that you're using, obviously going down to f11 solves most of that. As far as vignetting goes, and you're going to kind of see this as I roll through, this is a shot just of a, you know, drywall in the apartment here. And you can see that wide open at f1.8, you do have a lot of vignetting in dark corners, which again, in a shot like this, if I enable Lens Correction, it does take care of most of that. But what's interesting is the lens cleans up, and I didn't do every f-stop when I took these photos, I just kind of blew through these, but even by 5.6 is the f-stop, it starts to clean up pretty tightly, and as you move forward, you really don't notice too much of a difference. Now we're at f16, and then finally f22. So anyway, as you move through, obviously wide open, you are going to have typical vignetting issues. Now, you know, I don't mean to be overly harsh with this lens in terms of performance, because like I said, even expensive lenses, you can expect to see these things with, but it's important with whatever lens that you are using to do some of these test shots and kind of see what you can expect. You know, it does get pretty blurry on those edges, but you know, in real life application, if you move through, and this is a shot that I did, it's going to take a second to render here, because it's on the 5D Mark III, so it's a bigger image, but this was outside last week, because we were having all those storms in Texas, and if I zoom in a little bit and wait a second for it to render here, there we go, you can see that even near the edges in this image, and this was shot at f10, that it's pretty sharp. And so it cleans up at smaller apertures, and that's totally normal, and it does have a really nice sharpness to it, particularly for a lens at this price point. This is not an expensive lens, so anyway, something worth noting on there. But depends on what you shoot and what applications you like to use. I was doing some test shots, and my good friend Zeder, who is my cat, decided to do some posing for me and frolic around on the floor, and in a shot like this, which was shot actually wide open, this is at f1.8, and you know, if you like images where you play with in-focus and out-of-focus areas, you can see that for the most part, I think the out-of-focus areas on this lens are quite pleasing. A lot of that, remember I mentioned earlier that they upgraded the shutter blades to a seven blade configuration over the five that was in the f1.8 Mark II lens, and you know, it works out pretty well. It's pleasing to look at, this thing is capable of taking nice images, some other images just shooting around here, and again, as long as you keep things kind of in the center. This was at f8, and you can see, I know there's a highlight on it, but on the concrete floor at the bottom of the stairwell, things are in focus and they are reasonably sharp. And it has a nice tonality to it, as far as coating goes, I mentioned that the design is really pretty similar to the last lens, and you know, what I'm saying is this makes it an excellent value for the money, you gotta understand kind of where some of the limitations are. I did some shooting again at f, wide open, actually this was at f6.3, so you can kind of see what the out-of-focus areas do. If you look at some of the highlights back here, you can start to see the 7-blade diaphragm and kind of this octagon formation back here, so anyway. But anyway, in the areas that are sharp, are sharp, and in focus, and it has a nice look to it. I went around and shot, this was wide open at f1.8, so you can see, especially when you have highlights in the background, that they do blur out pretty quick. This isn't, this is a really shallow depth of field for a shot like this, it probably should have been stopped down a little more, but I was just trying to show you what the out-of-focus areas end up looking like with this wonderfully brilliant still life of an apple. Anyway, moving outside, this is even backlit, but you know, the flowers stay in focus, train moving by in the back. It works pretty well. Again, kind of probably want a deeper depth of field on something like this, these are all wide open, but you know, just looking at the out-of-focus areas. But anyway, I really like this lens actually, and I think it's an incredible value for the money. I shot this on both my Sony a7S and my Canon 5D. I'm really preferring the Sony a little more, and we'll talk about an adapter later that will allow you to access exit data and aperture functions inside the lens, and I've got one of those and I use that on here, so I didn't shoot everything wide open all the time. But I like the lens a lot, especially when I move over to the Sony body, which is a much lighter weight body than the Canon 5D Mark III is. I like the fact that, you know, I know it's a plastic lens, the build quality is decent, but it keeps everything lightweight, and I like that. I like having a 50mm lens that you can throw around and use for whatever you want to use. I forgot to put the shot in here, but sometimes here I can show you on one of these. You do notice a little bit of barrel distortion on some of these, and you know, that's at the 50mm length, that has nothing to do with this model of lens specifically. Canon do offer a 40mm lens, which is probably going to be closer to the straight line thing, but like I said, all of this is, you know, you can, within Lightroom and Photoshop, you can do profile corrections for the lens to accommodate for distortions and things, so it's really not a deal breaker. But all in all, I think it's a wonderful value for the money, and I love the lens. I want to take a second and give a shout out to our sponsor today, who are the awesome folks over at Audible.com. If you're not familiar with Audible.com, it's like a bookstore for your ears. They have over 180,000 titles of pretty much anything you can imagine, from fiction books to non-fiction books to periodicals, all types of literature right at your fingertips. You subscribe to the service and you get credits to download books. If you're like me and you like to read, and you're like me and you don't always have time to read, this is an excellent way of making use of time at the gym or on a commute, anywhere where reading would be difficult, but actually listening to a book is actually a great way to pass time. Traveling is excellent for Audible titles. They have a ton of great stuff in here, and really anything you can imagine. 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Go check out Audible. I think you're going to find them quite awesome, because I love them. Anyway, once again, I want to give a special shout out to the awesome folks over at audible.com for once again sponsoring another episode of The Art of Photography. So there you have it. For a lens that comes for about $125, I think you get a lot of bang for your buck on here. Like I said, it's not the perfect lens, and there's some things that are slightly frustrating about it. But it is a decent lens with decent optics. I don't know if it is going to be a professional go-to 50mm lens, but a lot of the complaints that I have are not so much optical as they are the actual construction and build of the lens. The plastic feel to it, the motorized focus ring, things like that. However, I think at that price point, it is a good price. I own a ton of 50mm lenses going all the way back to my 35mm photography days, and generally, I like to keep a 50mm lens on a camera instead of a lens cap, because it's generally ready to go. So if you already have a 50mm lens, this does make a decent second backup lens that you can keep on a backup body, so it's always ready to shoot. And if you don't have a 50mm lens, and you don't have a lot of money, I think this is an excellent buy. I got mine from B&H. I paid my own money for it. I was not sent this lens. And if I were to lose it, would I replace it? And the answer is probably yeah. I think it has a lot to offer, especially if you use autofocus a lot in your photography, and I think that's fairly important. And it performs well, and it won't break the bank. So anyway, check it out. I'll put the links below. You can get it from B&H. Amazon has it. There are a bunch of places you can find it, but I'll put direct links below if you want to use those. And once again, guys, this has been another episode of The Art of Photography. If you enjoyed this episode, please remember to like it and share it with your friends, and as always, subscribe so you'll be always up to date with the latest and greatest. We do all kinds of things on this show, from photo history to occasional gear reviews to you name it. Anything photography is totally on for talking about on here. So anyway, once again, guys, this has been The Art of Photography. I'll see you guys in the next video. Later.