Ok, so I’ve been learning – slowly – about proper photography. I’ve already gone and bought a Canon EOS 450D, and have started to get the hang of all this aperture and f-stop business. Something I noticed fairly early on was that although you’ve got more control over things like shutter speed and aperture, it’s still very hard to get good photos in low light conditions without resorting to a tripod and long exposure times. How do other photographers take photos indoors without a tripod?

It turns out that you need a lens which lets more light in; this means that the shutter speed can be faster and you get less chance of blur. The lens that comes with the EOS 450D has an aperture size – or f-stop – of 3.5 to 5.6. Now, until recently that meant nothing to me, and to be honest, I’m still not completely clear on how the numbers are relevant. What I do know, though, is that smaller numbers – e.g f1.8 rather than f3.5 – means that more light can enter the lens, because this means that the aperture is larger (the aperture is formed by the iris mechanism inside the lens). It also has an effect on depth of field – if the iris is wide open, then light is coming in across the full width of the lens. Due to the curved construction of the glass inside a lens, the light that enters through the outer edge of a lens tends to get scattered, and that results in the blurry background typical of SLR photography. A smaller aperture, say f5.6, means less light entering at the edges of the lens, so what light there is isn’t scattered and more of the background is in focus.

Anyway, eventually I realised that I needed a lens which had a larger aperture than my 3.5 lens. As luck would have it, there is actually a lens available which fits the bill, and even better, it’s dead cheap! For around £70-£80 you can pick up the Canon EF 50mm f1.8 MK2 lens, otherwise known as the “nifty fifty”. First thing to point out – this lens has no zoom capability; it’s a fixed length. It’s also not much in the wide-angle stakes, at 55mm (haven’t worked out quite how focal lengths work yet!), and it feels a bit cheaper than the lenses that came with the camera – which it is! But that doesn’t matter when you see its party piece – brilliant low-light shots, and stunning depth-of-field effects! I can now take shots indoors without worrying about camera shake – brilliant!

I found a thread over on the “Photography on the net” forums where lots of people are posting photos taken with the Canon EF 50mm f1.8 MK2 lens.