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When we talk about a “kit lens” these days, we usually mean a zoom covering focal lengths from wide-angle to short telephoto. But back when my beard was still chestnut-colored (or didn’t exist at all), cameras were commonly sold with a fixed 50mm lens. If you want a 50mm lens today, it may not come as a kit, but you have no shortage of options. For Nikon Z-mount alone, you can currently choose from no fewer than thirty-two different 50mm primes! In this review, I’d like to take a closer look at a recent addition to this rapidly growing family—the Viltrox AF 50mm f/1.4 Pro.
Photography Life
During a recent dive into the depths of my wildlife catalog, I realized that quite a number of telephoto lenses have taken turns on my Nikon Z9—starting with the Nikon AF-S 200-500mm f/5.6E ED VR and ending with beasts like the Nikon Z 600mm f/4 TC VR S. We’ve already published reviews of all of them on Photography Life, including their lab-measured sharpness Imatest scores. But sometimes, real photographs can tell you more than a column of hard data.
Photography Life
I think it would be worth remeasuring after all these years whether a day still lasts 24 hours and a year 365 days. I’m starting to seriously doubt it. Personally, I suspect we’re living on the lamplighter’s planet from The Little Prince, where the rotation keeps speeding up faster and faster. And I have proof! There’s a memory card that I had placed on my desk barely a few days ago to copy its contents to disk and cull the images. Today, I inserted into the reader and couldn’t believe my eyes. The card contains last year’s spring courtship of grebes! My feet are still cold from sitting in waders in the icy water of the pond. Well then. I’ll finish writing these News and go check whether mice have chewed a hole in those waders over the winter. I’m going to need them again very soon, and I’m fairly sure they’ll still be damp.
Photography Life
The idea for this article was born high in the mountains, while chatting with other photographers about what we had managed to capture during the fleeting appearance of a Bearded Vulture (which I wrote about in this article). Some of us nailed the shots in the few available seconds, and others fumbled with buttons and dials—or couldn’t find the subject in the viewfinder. The difference came down to muscle memory and the ability to set the camera quickly.
Photography Life
Not so long ago, my answer to the title question would have come out almost automatically: a prime lens, of course! Just a few decades ago, zoom lenses suffered from a whole range of optical compromises that made their use for portraiture and documentary photography somewhat questionable. But today? If your budget allows, you can buy a standard zoom with an f/2 aperture whose optical quality rivals — or even surpasses — many prime lenses, and instead of carrying four lenses, you can get away with just one. And yet, the popularity of prime lenses doesn’t seem to be declining. Quite the opposite. So which one is better for photographing people?
Photography Life