Lenses for stills

NickClapper

NickClapper

So, I bought a Canon 550D a couple of years back, when I wanted to get into filmmaking. I've used it a number of times but I've realised that I am never going to be a cinematographer, so it's been quite seriously neglected. I've decided that I want to use it to take some more stills, but I only have the kit lens at the moment and want to branch out a little bit.

What are the best (and I'm not using that word literally) lenses for me? I want something that's cheap, interesting and which I can get on eBay UK. And, of course, I want it to fit on my camera without me needing to buy a lens mount (unless I have to). Can anyone recommend me some good lenses?

Bonus points for lenses that are under £50 and extra bonus points for links to eBay UK listings! :)
 
Sort by date Sort by votes
I'm not up on my vintage lens information and don't know what good deals are out there out there at the moment.

But if you have the kit lens (18-55?) and think of buying new canon lenses, I can tell you that price does reflect quality when it comes to glass. Buying another lens that is around 200usd will give you the same quality as ur kit lens. Around 400usd would be your next significant quality improvement and then it just goes up from there in increments of around 200.

The only exception is the nifty-fifty we all know about since you can immediately allow a shallow dof cheaply.

Anyway, those r the basics of new canon glass and if you start thinking about it, I can go into much more detail on specific lenses.

Meanwhile, I'm sure you'll get some answers to your current requirements here. I don't know why but paul and wheat come to my mind when thinking of vintage glass. I must've read some posts in the past. Check with them if they don't see this thread and reply here first.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
Are you sure you need more than the kit lens?

A 28mm lens x 1.6 would give you 48.8mm or a 45mm lens equivalent, which would be around what's considered a normal lens, which, as a normal lens, should be a decent all round lens.

But I have no idea about the quality of this Sigma lens, or Sigman lenses in general.

I have this lens. It's nice. I will say though, that when operating the focus ring manually it doesn't feel quite "right" as my other lenses...which I'm sure matters little. I'm not knowledgable enough and I don't know how to articulate the difference. But as best as I can...because, I guess, it's a wide angle lens, there's, like, more "slack" in some of it's range, if that makes any sense.

Man do I not like the new (not so new now, I know) Ebay format. I really miss the previous one.

Not at all familiar with this lens, but it's in you price range. Will give you focal lengths 32mm to 56mm

which will give you an 80mm equivalent...which is close to the 85mm focal length that I am fond of.

I'm not familiar with zoom lenses.

But I know nothing about Tamron. Quite a slow lens.

Says it's good, but autofocus isn't as fast as it should be. Might be fine, but you might find that to be quite frustrating

Well, there are more zooms for cheap. See if this link to them works.

Didn't do an exhaustive search. I used to enjoy window shopping on Ebay before they changed to the current iteration. =(

Good luck and have fun!
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
jax_rox said:
For $100? I'd be looking at old FD mount Canon lenses, and adapting them.
Click to expand...

It's not entirely that simple. AFAIK, the flange focal distance (from the front of the lens mount on the camera to the imaging plane) is very different between FD and EF(-S) and as such would require some optics in the adapter to refocus it. This is doable, but means that cheap adapters are going to be just that, cheap glass. Unless you have a lot of great FD lenses, and depending on the price of a decent FD to EF adapter, you might be better off looking for cheap EF(-S) lenses.

I'm not sure, I'm only buying EF mounts, so I've not looked into it. But I would suggest you did before you put any money into an FD lens...

CraigL
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top