I've been looking at the Canon 20D, which has a good price for the features it has, and I'm trying to choose a lens. Apparently the 20D has a 1.6x magnification, so a 35mm would act close to a 50mm. Have you ever used a 24mm lens? The idea of being able to stuff more in a scene is appealing, but the price of having bulbous noses on people shots is not attractive. I don't want to get a zoom lens, I want a FAST lens, so my first thought was the 50mm f/1.4. I don't want to tote around a camera bag, but lately I'm thinking that if I budget further and get the 24mm and the (cheaper but well-made) 50mm I ought to have a decent range.
I'd bought a Canon E7 for the big trip to Hawaii several years ago and I took the worst pictures I've ever taken in my entire life with the setup. Lots and lots of them. Thank God the scenery was beautiful, you can't fuck that up too much... those shots are ok. I got better photos using my digital Nikon 950 (somewhat long in the tooth) and some really nice little FujiFilm disposable *underwater* cameras. I also had a cheap point-n-shoot with a date stamp, which I thought was cool. Crappy lens, though, worse than the Nikon 950. The colors from the FujiFilm underwater cameras were intense and deep and the photos weren't bad considering it had a plastic lens.
Once upon a time I had a Pentax K1000 and a 50mm f/1.4 lens and life was good. Then my house burned down and I took the burned-up corpse of my camera to the camera shop and they were kind but smiled and explained that restoring a $100 camera would not be practical... bought two more setups like that... only got rid of the third K1000 when I got my Nikon 950. Digital cameras = fuzzy pictures faster. It's a nice little camera and sometimes it will produce a nice photo, but there are a lot of shots you're glad you're able to preview and delete right away. I'd like a "real" camera again.
