A photo buddy and I recently met at the Stratford Peach Festival. He lives in Tulsa, and only occasionally makes time to do professional photography work, so he liked the idea of photographing the Festival.
He and I have known each other since college, where we were both photojournalism students.
In the embarrassingly large number of years since then, he and I have amassed large amounts of photo gear, some of it old, some of it new. One item he brought down to let me use was a new (in 2022) TTArtisan 50mm f/0.95.
If that last number sounds unusual, that’s because it is. Most 50mm lenses, among the most popular focal-lengths in the history of photography, have large maximum apertures like f/1.8, f/1.4, and even f/1.2. But the TTArtisan’s f/0.95 is unusual.
What does that even mean? Aperture, expressed as f/, is the ratio of focal length – the distance between the center of the lens and the focal plane – and the diameter of the opening of the lens. We can change that diameter by turning the aperture ring or the aperture control on a camera, or, in some cases, especially in the movie industry, we can drop in different aperture discs.
But this isn’t the kind of lens you buy to use for everything. The kit lens that came with your Canon EOS can do that. We buy these large apertures to shoot at these large apertures.
It’s worth noting that selective focus and “bokeh” don’t always serve the narrative. I’ve looked at a ton of samples that use lenses and software to emphasize the appearance of the background, and sometimes it can be very distracting. A great example would be the “swirl bokeh,” which to me just looks like clutter.
Lenses with large maximum apertures are known in the industry as “fast” lenses, and on the extreme end, we sometimes call them ultra-fast or super-fast, and the term superspeed also gets thrown around quite a bit.
So maybe you are interested in a superspeed lens.
One advantage might include being able to shoot in low light, but this is less important than it was 10 or 20 years ago because newer digital cameras feature crazy high, and crazy low-noise, ISO settings, so a huge aperture is less significant.
Another advantage to lenses like this is being able to generate softer, more out-of-focus backgrounds. The downside to that is that the actual portion of the image in sharp focus is very slim, often just a few millimeters, and most of these lenses are manual focus, so it can be tricky to get the focus where you want it.
There is a certain artistic element of making pictures with any camera or lens that’s unusual. When you put a different camera in your hands, your ideas about making pictures change.
In the end, it’s fun to imagine using lenses like this. They aren’t expensive, so if you have dreamed about it, pick one up, go for a sunset walk in the park or find your way to a street festival and start shooting with it! Even if the superspeed lens isn’t right for you, you will at least have fun exploring a new way to make pictures.
