Zooms or Primes

True, it isn't always something that is considered. Framing the subject takes priority for most people and then ignore what is going on behind.

I tend to go long for subject isolation or to isolate with less background. I go for the wide end when I want that wide angle perspective or to actually take a wide shot.

or they step out of thier car and zoom out to get the mountians in the shot and the people or animals or intersting subjects in the foreground look like ants or dust specs, when they could have walked up closer, used a wider lens and got decent sized subjects framed nicely with the mountians in the background!
either way reaching for the zoom ruins more shots than stopping for a minute to say I need to swap lenses. now which lens should I use?

Need to not have non photographer's around for that as they tend to get annoyed when you say "hold on, just need to change my lens" or "hold on, I want to take a picture". *sigh*

Primes for me (although I make an exception for the DA12-24).

I'd take the Pentax 250-600mm ZOOM over primes anyday

I can get the shot with a prime much faster than certain other shooters who need to try different zoom settings, machine-gun 40 shots of basically the same thing and chimp a bunch of exposures.

Inevitably these are the same people using a camera that beeps with every action... drives me crazy!

Yup! Me too!

I tend to use zooms more often, but I own more primes. And I think my next purchase will be a prime as well.

Gary

I consider perspective. I normally have a lens on one body that's a contrast to the lens on the other body. For example I might have my 135-400 ( or 50-135 ) on one body and a choice of wides/fish etc etc on the other.

I'm not sure what using a zoom as a dual prime has got to do with not considering perspective.

However I can understand why shooting from a fixed position often means no consideration for perspective.

I've got a collection of nice primes and I really do enjoy using them, but the 16-45 is the default lens on my K10D and gets used most of the time.

I was a great fan of the kit 18-55, but the extra 2mm at the wide end made such a difference, so now my poor old 18-55 never sees the light day.

So zooms for me then.

Cheers,

/Ian

Thought you would

Interesting TEST on the 16-45 v 18-55 here. Seems the 16-45 is better at the wide end slightly worse at the edge from 31mm and worse for Lateral CA throughout. The KIT Lens is still very underated Maybe they should start charging £300 for it

Under-rated? To be honest the praise heaped on the 18-55mm lens on this forum is a bit over the top... yes it's good value, but it isn't amazing. The 16-45mm is very much sharper especially at the wide end and large apertures, and the CA is very simple to clean up without affecting image quality.

I like using older lenses for their tactile qualities and generally for fun. I am finding that I am using my zooms (12-24, 18-55, 50-135) much less than my primes (e.g., K24/2.8, S-M-C Takumar 28/3.5, K50/1.2, M100/f2.8, K135/f2.5, M200/4), just as I am finding I am shooting more and more film and less and less on digital.

It is purely a psychological thing, but I find I get a much higher "keep" rate with film+primes than I do with digital+zooms.

As a result I voted "primes."




K.

I doubt it is. I got more keepers with my 124G than with old 35mm bodies. It because of the care that was taken in setting up the shots as a result of the lack of automation and also the processing costs.

The difference is even more marked between film and digital. Each film image costs, whilst digital doesn't. Also with digital, a lot of framing can take place after the event. This was very much less of the case with film.