Prime lens kit for canon 60D

[ayalara]

Hi,

I am building a prime lens kit for my canon 60D. I already have the canon 50mm f1.8 stm and the canon 135mm f2.8 soft focus.  I want to add prime lens in the wide, normal and medium telephoto focal length range. Don't have the budget to spend on L series lenses. Any suggestions?

Thanks,

Alberto Ayala

[ebiggs1]

"... primes don't go very wide for crop-frame cameras."

I don't know what he means?  Because there are some very WA lenses no matter what you put them on. Like the Rokionon 8mm, 10mm, 12mm, 14mm, etc,  primes.  OP says he can't MF focus but in this focal length almost everything is already in focus so focusing won't be a problem.

Now before some of you blow a gasket I know they aren't as WA as they would be on a FF, so just save it.  10mm is still pretty WA even on a cropper.

I believe Sigma still has a 19mm prime but it might be a M lens?  They have a 15mm with AF, too.

And there are more in the normal range and of course in the tele range. But these get pretty expensive pretty quickly.  That fact remains, prime lenses are a specialty item.  The current offerings in the zoom lens' often are better that some of these high priced primes. I too must recommend you or anyone stick with zooms as the best go.

[kvbarkley]

As I said, most *Canon* primes are EF lenses and the widest is 14 mm, certainly wide angle on a crop frame camera, but not super wide.

ETA, I see that I did *not* refer to Canon lenses in my original post. But I meant too. 8^)

[ayalara]

I have a question about the rokinon and other brand EF lenses that are manual focus and selecting the aperture manually. Since the lens does not have chip to connect with the camera, how the focus accurately and can you see the aperture in the camera viewfinder?

[kvbarkley]

The best way to focus accurately is to set the lens to the maximum aperture and use liveview/zoom to focus.

[Waddizzle]

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@ayalara wrote:
I have a question about the rokinon and other brand EF lenses that are manual focus and selecting the aperture manually. Since the lens does not have chip to connect with the camera, how the focus accurately and can you see the aperture in the camera viewfinder?

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Select Rokinon manual lenses contain the AE chip, so that the lens can communicate with the camera's AF system.  All of the manual lenses contain an approximate distance scale, which can be accurate for FF or APS-C sensors, depending upon the mount for the lens.  Most Rokinons are made for FF bodies, so the distance scales would only be accurate for FF sensors.

For lenses that don't have an AE chip, it is best to use the lenses in "M" or "Av" mode.  Depending upon the focal length, you may be able to get focus by looking through the viewfinder.  Success is entirely up to how well you can see. With wide angle lenses [below 20mm] you can usually set the focus distance to inifinity, or just below it, and  everything beyond a short distance will be in focus. 

The old 35mm film cameras usually had a focusing aid in the viewfinder.  Those focus reticules have been dropped with the advent of auto-focus lens technology.  Today, it is best to use the LCD, LiveView, to zoom in on a subject to achieve critical focus, especially when you get into using focal lengths over 20mm.  In those scenarios, with standard focal length manual lenses and longer, I am almost always using a tripod.

[EDIT]  As has been already noted, prime lenses have become somewhat of a specialty use lens.  I also want to point out that because most manual lenses do not communicate with the camera, your shots will not contain any lens shooting information in the EXIF data regarding focal length or aperture.  All you will get is shutter speed, which the camera generates, and other information generated by the camera, but no aperture value of focal length data.  In fact, if you use AFMA, the camera will probably not be able to tell the difference between one manual lens and the next.