I will admit, I’ve come to love my 50mm f/1.8 recently. Last shoot I did, the location was just too small for my 70-200mm f/2.8VR, so I pulled out the 50. I wouldn’t say using it made me any better of a photographer, but it did give me a new appreciation for my shorter primes.

I’ve never been a big fan of the whole “zoom with your feet” nonsense. It’s all well and good for people to keep parroting those kinds of things out, but when you move, it completely changes perspective.

Your subject could be the exact same size in the image, but shooting it at 50mm will be very different to shooting it at 105mm or at 200mm. Your subject will look pretty much exactly the same, but your environment won’t.

Having the flexibility of the zoom lets me get more control over the environment as well as my subject. But, it largely depends on what you shoot.

As I said above, the 70-200 is my lens of choice for portraits. Having zoom ability made me a better photographer because it made me think more about the scene perspective relative to my subject, that choice is taken away from you when you’re using a prime.

I don’t believe using a single prime makes you a better photographer. It just limits your choices and the number of photographs that will work. The only difference between a 70-200 and having 120 prime lenses between that focal range is that my bag is much smaller. :)

Very well said! The nifty fifty instantly became my favorite the first time I use it. And it made me want to purchase prime lenses in the future.

1) it was great lens to do portraits with
2) it gave me great control over DOF
3) I could shoot with a lot less light

But the most important reason I loved that lens is because this little prime lens challenged me to be a better photographer. Since I didn’t have a variable focal length to rely on, I was forced to move my body to compose all my shots – and that always helped me find much more interesting angles to shoot from.

What more could you ask for from a lens?

Speaking of polarising filters, they’re not so great on Ultra Wide Angle lenses like the Sigma 10-20mm f/4-5.6 (outstanding lens considering it’s not a Nikon). That lens has a 99 degree field of view at its widest on a Nikon DX 1.5x crop body. A circular polarizer isn’t really all that effective across the entire image when shooting that wide.

Most lenses have a thread at the front to take screw on filters, or attachment rings for square / rectangular filters, but some wide angle lenses, which you might want for landscape photography have such a large dome of glass in front that this is not possible. What they have instead is a slot deep within the optics wher one can drop in a simple filter. It is usually inside the camera body when the lens is mounted, which prevents one from ajjusting the angle of the filter in genral. This isn’t much good for landscape, where one might want a polarising filter, or an ND grad, both of which want adjustment to the image and conditions.