Over the years, a topic that I have raised over and over is the use of lenses with large maximum apertures. Just last week, I talked about the Christmas season as being one of the best for those lenses, like the famous 50mm.

Most of us have at least one of these in our bags, and if you’ve been around photography for any length of time, you might have accumulated several.

I love the 50mm, and last week I recommended them, but this week I want to add an important point: manual-focus 50mm lenses are harder to use than you might think.

Why?

1. Depth of field is shallower than you think. One of my earliest 50mm purchases was a Nikkor 50mm f/1.2. I got it for the expressed purpose of shooting it at f/1.2, but in practice, it never satisfied me, mostly because the depth of field was so shallow. The viewfinder was nice and bright, but even with my 20/13 vision when I was 20, I missed focus all the time, since being off by a single millimeter meant the image was focused in very much the wrong place.
2. Optical design and manufacturing in the 1970s and 1980s wasn’t what it is today, and shooting a lens wide open takes its design to its limits. Even today, 40 years later, shooting some f/1.2 or f/1.4 lenses wide open can turn an interesting selective focus effort into a picture that looks like a mistake.
3. The big glass area on the front of f/1.2 lenses invites all kinds of invasive flare and glare. Sometimes you can use it to create a narrative, but other times it can just be a mess. And lens hoods don’t really help. Just this week, I was photographing Tuba Christmas, which had bright floodlights behind the band (so they could see to read their sheet music), and my hood just wasn’t enough. I ended up holding my left hand up to extend the reach of my hood, but sometimes that results in me needing to crop my hand out of the image later.

Many newer mirrorless digital cameras have a feature called “focus peaking,” so that when an area of the image in focus lights up at the edges, making manual focus easier. In many cameras, including my Fujifilm mirrorless, I can set the color of the peaking to white, red, or blue.

I’ve never seen another 50mm f/1.2 in the field, and while I see 50mm f/1.4s and f/1.8s in my class in pretty much every camera bag, they don’t seem to make their way into the field. Part of this is the versatility of zoom lenses, and part of it is the challenge of making a “fast fifty” work well.

Still, I try to make them work, partly for the challenge, and partly because when you can make them work, they really deliver.