I’ve been meaning for some time to look into getting a new lens for my Canon DLSR. Ever since I’ve got it, I’ve used the kit lens, which have served me well, but sometimes just don’t make the mark. Over the past couple of days I’ve been doing some research and this morning was the big day!

I’m now the proud owner of a Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 II fixed lens!

It’s been a struggle to resist unpacking it all at work today, even though I did open it up and pull at the instructions (which I will never again be able to fold back to its original size). Tonight I finally got to test it out!

So because I couldn’t test it until I got home, there wasn’t much light, especially in my room where I’ve always had issues with my current lens. I thought this would make a good test for it, because it apparently copes better than other lens in low light.

For starters, I guess I had my expectations a little high for this lens in terms of sharpness. As you can see with the last 2 shots, there’s a bit of blurriness. From what I’ve read, fixed lens are supposed to have higher quality images so I expected to be getting really sharp photos. They looked sharp on the back of the camera, but once I uploaded them I felt a little disappointed. I guess this result is understandable though because of the low light, no image stabilisation the lens and my shaky hands.

I can definitely see that the aperture size made a difference though. You can see in the Tokidoki picture the effect this had on the depth of field. I also noticed after switching back to my current lens that the shutter speed had been greatly increased.

I wanted to do a side by side of my current and new lenses. Below is a shot I took with my camera mounted on a tripod. I let the cameras work out what settings it needed to take the picture and then compared them.

The photo on the left – Canon EF-S 18-55mm (kit lens). The photo on the right – Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 II.

This photo shows off the 50mm quite well the points I made earlier about depth of field, aperture and sharper photos. I worry that the slight smudges on the front of the 18-55mm affected this though (which reminds me that I have to look into cleaning products for it).

I’m looking forward to testing this new lens more out in the field and during the day so that it can really show its true potential. I’ll will post pictures when I do. I’m also wondering if I should replace my current kit lens with a better standard/zoom lens, because I could definitely do with that image stabilization. What do you guys think?