Last week I discussed the issues with shooting at high apertures. This week I want to talk about low aperture lenses, like the 2.0, 1.8, or 1.4 lenses. I actually came across a Voigtlander recently, which has an aperture of f0.8. That's right, you heard me right, it was 0.8, not 1.8, 0.8, which is kind of crazy. The idea that a lens can gather that much light is pretty fascinating, right? We're always looking for ways to capture more light, but the real challenge with these super wide apertures is the incredibly narrow focus range the offer. I've come to find that people who gravitate to these 1.4 or 1.8 lenses tend to be those who are trying to do portrait work, but a lot of these photographers tell me that they struggle with focus, often needing to close down to f2.8 just to maintain any sharpness in the image. It's common for people to think that using a lens with a super wide aperture will automatically blur the background, but that's only part of the story. Actually, let me back up for a bit. If you're shooting a Voigtlander at 0.08, yeah, pretty much everything's gonna drop out, okay? Actually at 1.4, pretty much everything's gonna probably drop out too. But aside from that, we do need to think about the other things that affect depth of field. So, depth of field is also influenced by the relative distance between you and the subject and the subject in the background. If you move the subject further away from the background, the background will naturally blur out and you don't necessarily need a super wide aperture for that. When you're shooting such wide apertures, unless you're shooting landscapes or things that are far away, your sharpness window is tiny. It's really easy to miss your focus. The problem is that you have to nail the focus perfectly, and to do that, you have to make sure nothing moves, which makes these lenses pretty impractical for a lot of situations.
If you're still interested in picking up a 1.0 or 0.8 lens, go for it. But if you're hoping these lenses will magically resolve your depth of field problems, you might find that they create more issues than they solve. I hope that was helpful. Until next time, keep on shooting.