Welcome to another Reader FAQ!

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On with today’s question…

If you only could use one lens for an entire wedding which would you choose? And do you guys shoot wide open? The light is always so awesome in your pictures!!

That’s easy – the Canon 50mm f/1.2 L.

I can tell you from looking into Lightroom and filtering based on metadata that we use this lens the most on a consistent basis.

However, if we could use TWO lenses, it would be the 50 mm f/1.2 L AND the Canon 135mm f/2.0 L.

That’s what I call a dynamic duo. The reason I love the 50mm so much is that it’s the perfect focal length on a full frame sensor and is actually very close to how our eye perceives the world.

Additionally, it’s incredibly crisp and sharp all the way through the range.

Erin and I are firm believers that people look best in natural light, so we spend a majority of the time shooting “wide open” which means using the lowest (biggest) aperture possible.

Not only does shooting wide open allow us to shoot in conditions that would ordinarily require a flash, but also shooting wide open separates the subject from the background (making the background extra blurry).

An important thing to note about shooting wide open is that you MUST be very very careful with your focusing due to the shallow depth of field that is created.

This causes us to have to over-shoot our subjects to ensure that we get the perfect focus.

To be specific, I shoot the 135 at f/2.0 all day and the 50 at f/ 1.8 (you have be very careful with the focus if you’re going to open up all the way to f/1.2, even though its beautiful).

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Cheers,

Jeff