lexaclarke said:
The thing Canon and other companies push 50mm for most these days seems to be as a beginner's first portrait lens which can then be an intermediate environmental portrait lens once someone has added an 85mm+ to their kit. I don't know if that's actually how the sales and market use work out but that is what most of the advertising seems to be built around.
I bought the 50mm f/1.4 to use as a portrait lens on my Rebel. It took me a while to figure out what lens to get. I knew I wanted to approximate the portrait features of an 85mm on FF, but didn't know what characteristic I was trying to emulate. Was there some magical quality to glass in that range that made portraits look good, or was it the camera-to-subject distance that I wanted to preserve? It turned out (as you guys know) to be the latter. So I got the 80mm "equivalent" for the Rebel, and had plenty of "bucket" (for you Hyacinth fans who mispronounce Japanese) wide open.
Since I bought my 6D2, I haven't used this lens at all. My 100mm f/2.8 macro works great for portraits right now, and I don't shoot very many, so getting an 85mm is somewhere down my list. I needed a recent picture of myself, so yesterday I put the 6D2 with the 100mm on a tripod, got out the cheap generic wireless trigger, flipped the screen around so I could compose the shots, and set a delay so I could concentrate on posing after I hit the button. The results were great, even given the subject matter. The lens is way too sharp, though, and picked up blemishes and such that I don't see when I look in the mirror. I didn't bother to look at some settings, and shot everything at f/7.1 in AV mode. I didn't need to blur the blank wall behind me anyway, and everything was in sharp focus.
Unless I want to shoot at f/1.4 or f/2, the reality is that anything I might want to shoot in the 50mm range on the 6D2 will be with the 24mm-105mm STM anyway.