What are your significant lenses.

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woof woof

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Reading and posting in the Significant Camera thread made me wonder if lenses have been as significant. I suppose my first camera was the most significant photography related thing as it got me going but after that lenses maybe vie for significance for me so I thought I'd post a complimentary thread about lenses.

As with cameras I don't think I have a most significant lens, more a series of milestones. My first camera had a fixed and fixed focus 43mm f11 lens and I mostly like a standard-ish or there abouts lens today. My milestone lenses have included...

Voigtlander 35mm f2.5 Color Skopar which made a good general purpose lens on a RF. Like my Kodak Instamatic it was a one camera and lens to do it all.

Tamron 17-50mm f2.8 (APS-C lens.) This lens convinced me that lenses can be too sharp, especially for pictures of your GF. I'd not had that problem before and it did make me think about how people pictures should be taken and looked at.

Sigma 30mm f1.4 (APSC-lens.) This gave me accurate and fast AF and shallow DoF for the first time.

Sigma 50mm f1.4 (FF) which along with the 85mm f1.8 and 12-24mm pushed me from APS-C to FF. The 50mm was the one that was on my camera the most.

Sony 55mm f1.8 which convinced me that modern lenses were technically better than the lenses of only a few years before.

Sony 35mm f2.8. So small and light that it's pushed MFT mostly out of the way as my FF A7 with the 35mm f2.8 isn't significantly bigger or heavier than a MFT camera and lens.

Voigtlander 35mm f1.4 (E mount and used on my Sony A7.) This lens has largely pushed my film era primes out of the way.

Minolta Rokkor 55mm f1.7. This got me interested in using old film era lenses on modern mirrorless cameras and lead to me buying more and more :D

In recent times I've been looking for that one camera and lens package to get back to the basics of the Kodak again. The closest so far has been my Sony A7 and 35mm f2.8 but the Voigtlander 35mm f1.4 gets a look in too as it's small and light and nice to use if there's time to MF or I want to do hyperfocal.

What are your milestone or even (if you have one) most significant lens/lenses?
 
I think for me it is probably the Nikon 24-70mm f2.8, it was the first pro grade lens i bought and really opened my eyes as to what better lenses give you. That being said I do now have an eye on upgrading to the Z mount version as I shift across to mirrorless
 
Zuiko 50mm f1.8

Because for a long while, it was all I had.
 
keeweeman said:
I think for me it is probably the Nikon 24-70mm f2.8, it was the first pro grade lens i bought and really opened my eyes as to what better lenses give you. That being said I do now have an eye on upgrading to the Z mount version as I shift across to mirrorless
Click to expand...

I've been thinking recently about technically very good lenses. I've recently bought a new 24mm f2.8 and apart from barrel distortion (which is corrected by a lens profile) it is imo just excellent for sharpness across the frame and into the corners, for colour, contrast and resistance to flare which seems to be outstanding. It is mostly (apart from that barrel distortion and even that goes with one ticked box) just excellent. But, this and other very good modern lenses sort of make me want to use old film era lenses more because all that (relative) softness, vignetting, ca, flare and veiling and all the rest just give a different look.

This guy talks about this and at about 1:50 he shows what the old lens produces.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMwrYohDz00


I suppose we're lucky these days as we have access to both the pictorially interesting and technically excellent and can uses them all on the same camera.
 
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Canon FD 50mm f/1.8: Came as the kit lens with the AV-1 that I got for my birthday circa 1981. I didn't shoot with anything other than this for the best part of 15 or 20 years until I noticed the price of good manual focus FD lenses had plummeted and I could afford all the fancy primes I had wanted as a teenager.

A bag full of EF lenses including the 70-200 f/2.8 convinced me that, in general, I do not like autofocus especially with big, heavy zooms on big, heavy camera bodies (such as a gripped 5D).

Contax C/Y Sonnar 85mm f/2.8 AE and a Contax C/Y Planar 50mm f/1.7: Bought for £10 each in a charity shop, and probably paid more for an adapter to put it on my Canon 5D - oh, so that's what the fuss about Zeiss lenses is about! This was the start of a dangerous path...

Contax C/Y Vario-Sonnar 35-70mm f/2.8 MM: finally persuaded me that there is a zoom lens that is worthwhile carrying instead of a bag of primes.
 
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I have modern lenses but the one that sticks in my mind the most was a Vivitar Series 1 200mm f3 from the seventies. It was a mighty piece of glass for it's time. How sharp it was I couldn't tell you as with HP5 film and no experience it might have been crap but it was a stunner for me.
 
Can't remember the exact details but it was a completely manual (2 aperture rings, one to "preset" the desired aperture, one to set the actual aperture) 55mm in 42mm screw mount.
 
woof woof said:
I've been thinking recently about technically very good lenses. I've recently bought a new 24mm f2.8 and apart from barrel distortion (which is corrected by a lens profile) it is imo just excellent for sharpness across the frame and into the corners, for colour, contrast and resistance to flare which seems to be outstanding. It is mostly (apart from that barrel distortion and even that goes with one ticked box) just excellent. But, this and other very good modern lenses sort of make me want to use old film era lenses more because all that (relative) softness, vignetting, ca, flare and veiling and all the rest just give a different look.

This guy talks about this and at about 1:50 he shows what the old lens produces.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMwrYohDz00


I suppose we're lucky these days as we have access to both the pictorially interesting and technically excellent and can uses them all on the same camera.
Click to expand...
I get what you mean about the older lenses, and the ability to manual focus so accurately on mirrorless makes them more accessible too, but they aren't really my cup of tea. I like the sharpness and contrast given by modern lenses, but it is purely a personal preference. I did consider the tokina 11-16mm for this thread, but as much as i loved that lens, the edge softness annoyed me on several photos and so eventually i was happy to trade it in.
 
I moved into digital when the Canon 350D came out. I carried over some cheap lenses from my old EOS film camera. It was quickly apparant that the 70-210mm lens I had was absolute tosh, and that was replaced quickly with a Sigma 70-300 which was better. The first really good lens I bought was a Sigma 100-300 f4 EX and the image quality of that really surprised me, going from cheap and nasty lenses to something pretty decent.
 
I have a 55mm f2.8 micro-nikkor that I bought new in 1980. I still have it and still use it, literally every week. It's been on multiple different Nikon bodies, and adapted to several mirrorless bodies, Olympus, Lumix and Fuji.

I also had a 60mm f2.8 G micro Nikkor at work and a few years ago did some comparisons to see how much better a new lens would be. Not surprisingly the new lens was much contrastier and sharper at f2.8 and f4. However, by f5.6 the difference was negligible, and at smaller apertures diffraction was far more noticeable on the new lens. Tests were mainly at infinity.

It's a delightfully small and light lens compared to modern FF AF lenses, and the deeply inset front element means a lenshood isn't needed. It gives nice colours and although, I don't really think it fully matches the contrast of a modern lens, I don't find it an issue and sharpness is fine as I'm rarely wider than f8.

MTF curves, and a review of this lens are here:

photographylife.com

Nikon Micro-NIKKOR 55mm f/2.8 Ai-S

photographylife.com photographylife.com

This is the one lens I own that I will never get rid of.
 
My first significant lens was my first bit of L glass from Canon. It was the 300mm F4 prime with IS. My first IS lens in fact.
Despite having higher res camera bodies now and owning 2 out of the top ten sharpest lenses on DXO, I still think the 300mm was the sharpest lens I have ever owned.

Broke my having to sell it. :dummy:
 
I have a few....

Sony 70-400mm - really forced me to learn to handhold well and opened up my eyes to various possibilities. First long telephoto.

Sony Zeiss 35mm f2.8 - I quite like this focal length, most of my favourite landscapes are taken with this focal length. This lens really made me fall in love with it.

Canon EF 100mm f2 - this got me into portraits. Eventually replaced it with a native 85mm f1.8 lens because there is no equivalent in Sony world.

Sony 24-105mm f4 - my favourite travel and landscape lens.

Funnily enough I don't own any of these lenses.
 
After being disappointed with first the kit lens then a superzoom, the canon 50 f1.8 really got me started.

After that I splashed out on the 24-70 2.8 and these two served well for a long time and I still have them.
 
Vivitar 90mm M42 f/2.8 macro lens.

I had just moved to Spain and was looking for a hobby, saw an article on macro photography and thought it looked interesting. Purchased used DSLR off a forum, the lens off Ebay and away I went .... still enjoy macro even today.

Sigma 120-400mm.

Also while I lived in Spain, wanted something to photograph a flock of Flamingoes ... I have been hunting for the perfect wildlife combo ever since. :rolleyes:
 
Certainly not the 'best' lens I've owned but the Voigtlander 40mm f/1.4 Classic MC in Leica M mount ;)

Yes, The E mount 40/1.2 is technically 'better' & gives nicer images. The 35GM is 'better' again...... But for me, that 40mm Classic is where it all started for me. I rarely use it anymore (I actually had it boxed up to sell recently!) & I had my Canon days for years before that too so it's not like it's my first prime or anything....... but there's just something (maybe sentimental now) about it :) So much so, I'm tempted to spend an occasional day shooting 'street' scenes with it as a little non-landscape project.
 
The first lens that ever made me go 'wow' a bit was the zoom on my fathers cine camera - he let me handle it and try the zoom as a smallish boy in the 60s, and I was amazed.

With my own cameras a friend gave me an old 18mm (might have been a cosina) in Nikon mount that I adapted to Minolta and loved to use, even though it was a little soft. I've had a soft spot for ultra-wide lenses ever since, and have owned 2 Sigma 12-24 MkIs.

My other love is for super-fast lenses with wafer thin depth of field and beautiful soft bokeh, and I really liked the Samyang 50 f1.4 in FE mount that I regret selling on. The 85 f1.4 is good, but just lacks the versatility of a slightly wider viewing angle and doesn't give quite such a lovely rendering.
 
Tough choices.

Digital lenses, I have to say the combination of the Olympus 12-40 Pro and 40-150 Pro (both F/2.8) is simply marvellous. Compact, light and very crisp.

Pre-digital is a harder choice but if I chose three from my collection they would be:

Tamron SP 90mm F/2.5 - compact and relatively fast 90mm that just makes me happy every time I use it on film or my digital cameras.

Jupiter 11 135mm F/4 - a heavy chunk of chrome coloured metal that turns any outing into a discussion with strangers. No more outstanding than other 135's I've had but no worse either.

Mir-1 Grand Prix edition 37mm F/2.8 - quirky little thing that takes lovely pictures with interesting bokeh. Mine needs stripping as the grease is making the focus difficult to use.
 
I used to own Olympus 4/3 equipment and had the privilege of owning a set of the SHG lenses, 7-14, 14-35, 35-100 and 90-250 lenses. They were such stunning lenses, the IQ was superb, the resolution and detail was out of this world, they were big and heavy but such good lenses.
 
Olympus m.Zuiko 40-150 f/2.8, incredible optics, relatively lightweight and superb build quality giving an 80-300 equivalent view on m4/3 cameras. Probably more than 50% of the photos on my Flickr account have been shot with this.
 
For my birding it's the FE 600 F4 You don't always get a second chance and with this Len's you don't often need a second chance .
My other lenses cover me from 24mm up to the 600 so i feel very happy with my set up but will swop my FE 70/200 f2.8 for the new one next year.
Rob.
 
Nikkor 200-500 f5.6. Convenience, price and quality in one package. Only thing that let's it down is OE.

I've got a ton of kit around me which I cherish, like my Pentax limiteds and FA* lenses but for the type of photography I do, the D500 and 200-500 gets taken out the most,
 
Tamron 70-210 f3.5 'Slide' Zoom on my 35mm Canon A1 - opened a whole new world for me, even though it cost me 3 months salary in the late 70's
It was the envy of my friends and allowed me to get some spectacular shots at the time, wish I had kept it.
 
Let's go vintage. For about 20 years my staple lens (on 35mm) was a Tele Ennalyt 90mm f/2.8, click-stopped and with a screw mount. I bought it whilst still at school.
teleennalyt2890.jpg
I developed the knack of focussing wide open, then still with my eye to the finder, spinning the aperture ring whilst counting the clicks.
I can't remember anything remarkable about it, performance-wise, but it was my chosen default for focal length.

Some years later, and for about 25 years, my default was a Nikkor 85mm f/2.
nikkor85-2.jpg
I used it with the complementary HS-10 hood.
 
I have one of those, I have the AI-S one, the one with the shorter focus throw.
 
I don't really have a "significant" lens as such, it depends what I'm shooting. For motorsport I use the Canon 70D and I suppose the lens that gets the most use for that is the Canon 70-300. For travel / landscape I use a Fuji X-T3 and love the fuji 18-55 ( I have the Jap version) as it covers most situations. I do love a good prime lens though and my fave out of those is the Zeiss Flektogon 35mm f2.4, it's lovely old thing and a nice focal length on a crop sensor camera in a variety of situations.
 
My first decent lens was a Sigma 105macro
i had just bought the Canon 350D when it came out and was struggling to photograph bees with the kit lens that came with the camera
my wife suggested buying a proper lens
the Sigma macro was amazing and transformed my photography
Ive still got that lens and it still gives excellent sharp results although the autofocus is a bit intermittent now but it’s had a lot of use over the years
 
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