Solved: Lens for Cannon EOS 550D – Canon Community
On a similar budget, there is the EF-S 24mm f/2.8 STM “pancake” lens (it’s thin… hence “pancake”) It costs roughly the same as the 50mm f/1.8 STM lens. This 24mm isn’t going to capture as much light as the 50mm…. the 24mm is only an f/2.8 lens (which collects more light than your “kit” lens but not as much as the 50mm when these two cameras are using a “wide open” aperture.) (The Canon 28mm f/1.8 would collect just as much light as the 50mm and the advantage of 28mm is that’s actually a “normal” focal length (neither wide-angle nor telephoto focal length — but that lens is about $450.)
But since this is an “EF-S” lens it can ONLY be used on Canon EOS camera bodies that have APS-C size sensors (all “Rebel” bodies have APS-C size sensors. The 6D, 5D series, and 1D X are “full frame” sensor bodies and cannot use EF-S lenses so if you ever buy a full-frame camera at some point in the future, you wouldn’t be able to use this lens.)
As you get to wider angles, things that should be “vertical” in your images can start to lean and you’ll need to be watchful of that. If the lens is angled upward then vertical objects will lean “in”. If the lens is angled downward then vertical objects will lean “out”. Vertical objects will only remain vertical if the lens is “level”.
Wide angles usually aren’t desirable for portraits because of the distortions… but if used carefully you can get some great results. Here’s a photo (not mine) by Clayton Karas taken using a full-frame camera with a 14mm lens (ultra ultra wide) and it looks great! But the photographer would have needed to take care to keep that lens axis “level” to avoid having a trapezoid shaped wall behend the model.
Edit: Forgot to post the link – fixed that.
