Roy Pertchik
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I currently have three 2.8 zooms, and three primes and a T&S lens,... Here's some stuff I posted a while back:
If you combine dial-a-zoom with foot-zoom, you can really control the 3-dimensional juxtaposition of elements in a very fluid way... Lets say I am liking the way a tree branch in the foreground frames around a house beyond, for example, but I want to lift the branch a bit in the composition, so I walk forward which raises the branch in the foreground relative to the house beyond, but now I start to loose the sides of the house because I walked forward, so now I also zoom back out a bit... and as I zoom out, I start to see a white picket fence coming in from the sides, so I think I'd like to trade some of the branch-lifting I accomplished by walking forward for some more fence-encroachment from the sides.. so now I step backwards just a bit to drop the branch slightly but also bring the fence in from the sides, and I finish up by zooming in tighter a bit to compensate for the last step back... and I finally strike a balance between ideal position and ideal focal length.. This iterative, recursive compositional process is impractical with primes. Now, I don’t think this is how most people think of zooms, but if you just stand in one spot and zoom in and out to fill the frame thoughtlessly, you are wasting the finesse available with a zoom... The full benefit is realized if you combine foot zoom with dial-a-zoom and achieve the perfect perspective and the perfect focal length to have the 3 dimensional elements arranged just so on your 2 dimensional picture.
Now, with regard to resolution and sharpness issues, zooms often have an advantage here too, because you can do most of your cropping in camera, and obviously you are way ahead of the game compared to cropping in the computer. For example, in a real situation, one might have the opportunity to go from say an 85 prime to a 135 prime to frame a portrait just so, but one may chose not to bother changing primes so as not to interrupt the flow, and instead plan to do the crop on the computer... but just the difference of one lens step, 85 to 135, is approximately 100% difference in surface area... so if you do it with a crop in the PC, that's a 50% throw away of pixels, and a 1.4x enlargement of CoC, etc. etc. thereby completely destroying any sharpness/resolution advantage the prime may have had over a zoom that would have accomplished the same crop in camera. Yes, if you are doing careful tripod work in a studio, for product shots for example, you can take the time needed to get the right prime and the right camera position to optimize quality, and thereby reap the benefit of primes. But I have found that in the field, with a DSLR, the whole point of these cameras is hand hold-ability and fluidity, and in the real world, I'm finding zooms will get me better compositions, and better trade-offs between compositional elements (by combining dial-a-zoom with foot zoom), and even better sharpness/resolution because of better in camera cropping.
I keep some primes for low light and extreme bokeh (24 L, 50 1.4, 85 1.8). Sometimes, to be inconspicuous, I'll just go out with one prime, maybe a second in my pocket. In a dark setting, I might bring the 24 on a crop body and the 85 on full frame, then swap to increase range when I want it.
Edited on Aug 29, 2008 at 11:27 PM
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(Ok, I do have a couple low end Leica's, but still... nothing to be snobbish about).