Some good discussion on DOF. IMO this is a point many seasoned full frame advocates conveniently forget or not fully understood by novice FF advocates. Unless you are shooting a single subject and also don't care about the environment, adequate DOF is an essential requirement for a good image. So even if you have a f0.95 APSC lens or f1.4 FF lens, you cannot shoot it wide open in these situations. I'd rather raise the ISO to have a DOF that ensures all the subjects I want to be in focus will be sharp; otherwise what's the use of a clean image but with blurry subjects.
It's impossible to make a blanket statement on which aperture is enough for low light shooting, as we shoot different subjects. It would be useful for each one to go back to his archives to check the shooting parameters in low light.
In my own experience, a typical low light situation is in even street scenes or dimly lit restaurants. If it's even darker, I mostly likely won't find anything interesting to shoot. So I have found f2 on APSC to be a sweet spot between performance and lens weight: it will enable me to stay below ISO6400 without hand shake in 90 percent of my low light situations. Often I can stretch it to f2.8, say if I only have a zoom, by accepting more noise. F1.4 lenses will give me more flexibility and cleaner images, at the cost of more weight (but not too bad). Full frame f1.4 I find useless in many low light situations because of DOF, but they may have their use in portrait shooting if extreme thin DOF is your style.
foto16 wrote:
It's impossible to make a blanket statement on which aperture is enough for low light shooting, as we shoot different subjects. It would be useful for each one to go back to his archives to check the shooting parameters in low light.
As I mentioned earlier, at one point I went back through a whole bunch of my night street photography looking for shots on a particular lens at f/1.4 after someone claimed the lens (maybe the 23mm f/1.4, or possibly the 35mm f/1.4?) was poor wide open. It turns out that I only very rarely — as in almost never — actually shoot at f/.4 with those lenses.
My typical range in urban night shots was f/2-f/4, and the middle or that range was probably most common.
In those situations I shoot at ISOs between 800 and 3200, rarely (almost never) going to 6400. There’s going to be noise, but I shoot raw and it is easy to clean the noise up in post.
In addition, I tend to expose to avoid blowing out highlights, even if that meant means that the overall image is a bit on the dark side. Again, no problem — I anticipate bringing up the shadows and middle tones in post.
These days, at least if the subjects aren’t moving too fast, IBIS helps a lot with the longer exposures.
For travel photography, I lean on the 23/f2 lens in part because of its diminutive size, but the 16/f1.4 is my favorite lens because of its image quality and close focusing distance (5.9").
Going back a few posts re pixel shift: IMHO it’s biggest features are a tad better color fidelity and simply more file resolution. However, file resolution does not equal optical resolution, so we’re not saying “sharper image,” we’re saying bigger. What file resolution does give you is an easy way to get to a larger final image, AND additional “croppability” before resolution diminishes to an unusable level. The color fidelity of Fuji XTrans sensors is already excellent before any pixel shift, so while some gains are theoretically there, they’re probably not going to be significant most of the time.
16 vs 18 as a carry prime. From all my research, I settled on the 16/1.4. Too many folks rave about its performance to ignore that potential. The 18/1.4 is likely even better optically, but historically I know for me, I use 16 (Fx 24) more than I do 18 (Fx 27/8). My traditional favorite prime trio is filled by APS-c 16, 35 and 56. The reality however is my 16-55 works just fine at 16 or 18; or 23, 27, 35 or 55. Plus it is always with me, so primes in that range are really superfluous. But I like the je-ne-sais-quoi of shooting with them, and so having 3 faster than my zoom make at least some sense for me. My point here is I don’t own them so I can shoot better at night; so my advice is first make sure you know if you even need them, or at the very least understand why you want them and how/what/when you’ll use them…
When I made the same choice, I ended up with the 18/1.4. It seemed a toss up on IQ based on reports. I decided I didn't really want one lens in the line-up that used the focus clutch when none of my other do. The 18 is the same feel and layout as the 33 which I also have. I don't think you will go wrong either way.
