I cannot believe I am writing another prime vs zoom... Still, I am just back from vacation and have my 2c ready. I think one important aspect of primes is underrated: convenience. For this week I had in my bag a 24, a 50 and a 135 lenses. The final result was that I took a half dozen pics with 24mm, a half dozen with 135mm, and the rest of 5 rolls with 50mm. I had to swap the lenses only 3-4 times, and those were moments when I *had to* -- there's no way to take any sensible pic with the normal lens. And the 1 smal lens + 1 small body setup is godsent when you have to carry it on your shoulder from 8 am to 1 am day after day and shoot in busy places in a moderately friendly city!
I think the single strongest attraction to zooms is that people feel that otherwise, having only 1 normal lens, they would miss a lot of shots. This can be true or false, depending how you look at it. Speaking for myself, I have realized one day that I cannot take *every* shot, no matter what lenses I have. It is physically impossible. The trick is to get the best out of what you have. And this is where the fun is, since you have to turn your brain on. In the end it turns out that the percentage of trully missed opportunities is tiny and most of shots can be taken with almost any sensible lens if you give it a little thought (of course, street photography with 500mm tele is probably as inconvenient as shooting birds with 20mm wide angle, but I am not talking about extremes here). In the end, I think zooms are great for people who are trying to figure out whether photography is worth doing at all. But once you are after that stage, it's just another annoyance -- extra weight to carry, extra compromises to cope with and not much use if you think about it. LAUNCH - Your Yahoo! Music Experience http://launch.yahoo.com - This message is from the Pentax-Discuss Mail List. To unsubscribe, go to http://www.pdml.net and follow the directions. Don't forget to visit the Pentax Users' Gallery at http://pug.komkon.org .
