Hobbyist needs tips on engagement photo shoot, tomorrow!

[Derrel]

No, I was not trying to kid you. My experience is that macro lenses are poor performers in many social photography situations, at longer distances. For two-person work on a crop-body Canon, the working distances will be such that you'll be able to get good focus most of the time, but will quite possibly have a disappointingly high percentage of slightly out of focus images--provided that you look at the images really critically. That "whirring: of the lens you mentioned in lower light...that's one example of a macro lens having difficulty finding a focus that is even remotely CLOSE enough to be considered a focus lock. And that's the issue: at longer distances, "close enough" looks good enough to most AF systems...and the camera will give the go-ahead and consider the focus to be "good enough". And it might be, but my experience has been that no macro lens works as well as a "field telephoto" for portraiture. And I am being serious. The obvious point though is that 60mm is one, single focal length; a zoom is much easier to work with with two people as the subjects. Maybe the Canon 60 macro is some kind of miraculous macro lens that can nail focus every time at 15-20 feet...and by nail focus I mean CRITICALLY-accurate focus, shot after shot after shot, in a fluid manner; that is not my experience with macro lenses at the range of 10-15-20-30 feet....not at all...often the focus will be "close", meaning close enough for the AF system to allow the shot to be tripped, but with the focus often three to six inches forward or backward of where it ought to be, at the distances where two people will fit into a frame.

 

[CaptSaltyJack]

Hmm, I'll have to do some tests with it and see. Thanks for the info, Derrel. I'm assuming you'd advise me to mostly use my Canon EF-S 55-250mm?