a question for you...

[mysteryscribe]

Mule drinks beer..

 

[ksmattfish]

Do you use a half dozen prime lenses for the higher quality or do you make the trade off for a zoom lens that is more convenient.

For me it's not an issue of quality vs. convenience. Sure I've read the articles about how the $70 Canon 50mm f/1.8 can beat out top dollar L zooms, but the degree of pixel peeping necessary to actually see the difference with human eyeballs doesn't have a place in my world. I carry both zooms and primes, and have had plenty of opportunities to compare the results on my monitor, and as prints. When used correctly they all rock! If there are quality issues I usually find that the fault is with my technique rather than the gear.

For me it's a choice between what I will find more useful: more choices in focal length, or more choices in aperture? Many times when shooting weddings I find myself carrying one camera with a zoom, and another with a fast prime, and I use both.

When I shot weddings with film I stuck to primes, because that's what I had. I don't even know if they made zooms for my Hassy, and the Pentax 67 zooms were way too expensive. For 35mm I used Nikon FM2n's, and I just wasn't thrilled with the quality I got from older, manual focus Nikon zooms. Today's zooms are a different story. I'm blown away at how good my modern zooms do at f/2.8.