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Lenses without autofocus: what can you use them for?
by David Lee
A snapshot: 5 months travelling with a cheap lens
I took the inexpensive Canon RF 24-105 mm f/4.0-7.1 with me as a stopgap on a long trip. Surprisingly enough, it became my favourite lens. Even its supposed drawbacks barely get in the way of landscape photography.
When travelling around New Zealand for a few months, I should probably have chosen the more expensive lens. But since I already had the cheap one, I took that with me. I didn’t expect to use it that often.
How wrong I was.
The lens of choice for three quarters of all photos
In case I needed a large aperture, I also took the 50 mm f/1.8 with me. I ended up only taking five photos with it, four of them cat portraits.
But why did I use the cheap lens so often? The first reason is pretty banal. The 24-105 mm focal length is the most versatile of my lenses. And I rarely need a wide angle of less than 24 mm for landscape photography. Even if the scenery were compatible, extreme wide angles require careful alignment and composition. The medium focal length range is much better suited for spontaneous shooting.
I was too lazy to keep changing lenses
The second reason is linked to the first: I’d have needed to attach the 14-35 mm to the camera for individual photos. Changing lenses on the road was more of a hassle than I wanted to admit beforehand. I was often out hiking in the countryside with the lens in my rucksack. Switching it meant:
Quite the process. I only did it if there was a very good reason. Otherwise I left the most versatile lens on, and that was the 24-105 mm.
So much so that I even sometimes used it for taking shots of small birds instead of switching to the 100-400 mm. I was helped by the fact that birds in New Zealand are less shy than in Europe.
The lens’s flaws hardly bother me
The third reason is the most amazing: I quickly realised I was actually satisfied with the image quality. Of the 2,136 pictures, there are only a few that would’ve turned out better had I used a high-quality L lens.
Obviously, I took another close look for this article – and yes, I admit the images could be a bit sharper. However, obsessively zooming in on photos to discover any flaws, also known as pixel peeping, quickly becomes a kind of obsessive-compulsive disorder – especially if you only end up displaying photos on your smartphone.
The lens only shows a visible blur in the corners, and even then only in wide angles. However, I only see this weakness as purely theoretical, since the corners of the picture hardly ever have anything that should be sharp. In landscape shots, for instance, the corners are often featureless, with a blue sky at the top. There’s some structure in the lower corners, but this would be blurred even with a high-quality lens as it’s not in focus.
Even more theoretical are its other weaknesses such as vignetting and distortion. This is all corrected automatically in the camera’s viewfinder and later in Adobe Lightroom. Even in RAW format. If I switch off these corrections manually in Lightroom, I can already see a difference. But why would I do that?
But what about the aperture?
Verdict: price isn’t the deciding factor
The usefulness of a lens doesn’t depend on its price. It’s more about whether it’s tailored to your intended use. In my case, for example, maximum aperture and edge sharpness weren’t important. However, these are two things that drive up the price of a lens considerably.
So my tip is: don’t get bogged down in pixel peeping and instead find out which aspects are really important to you in a lens and which aren’t. In order to know exactly what you’re looking for in a camera, you need to take a lot of photos. And don’t forget that if the results are completely unsatisfactory, it’s very rarely down to the equipment.
David Lee
Senior Editor
David.Lee@digitecgalaxus.chMy interest in IT and writing landed me in tech journalism early on (2000). I want to know how we can use technology without being used. Outside of the office, I’m a keen musician who makes up for lacking talent with excessive enthusiasm.
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