Canon EF 50mm f/2.5 Compact Macro Lens

My first Macro lens on the Xti -- I am loving using it so far. The picture clarity is as sharp as can be, lovely background blur, great color. Its a simple lens for a simple job and beyond it also doubles as a pretty great portrait lens.

I bought it to use as macro, but be careful if you want it to use 1x1. As portrail photografy, is also excellent and very lightful.

I bought this lens through a seller on Amazon about 6 months ago and have been very happy with it. The Canon EF 50mm Compact Macro Lens has served as a great introduction into macro lenses and close up photography. It's been a good lens for that purpose, and I would recommend it to any amateur who might be interested in photographing the smaller things in life. However, with continued use, I'm starting to think that I should have bit the bullet and bought the 100mm as opposed to the 50mm. The main reason being that at times, I've found myself having to get extremely close to the subject which makes capturing images of insects and animals difficult and scary at times :)

If you're looking for a 50mm lens that's sharp, built better than the Canon 50/1.8 and less expensive than the 50/1.4, this is a good choice. Although by no means the best macro lens I've ever used (contrast could be better and its a little soft in the corners if used on full-frame), its the best $200 macro I've ever used.

The reason its going back is that about 1/3 of the time it settled on the wrong focus point. I was a little surprised, given the shallow depth of field when shooting up close. I don't see anybody else having this problem so maybe this is a fluke or one of those Canon adjustments.

But this lens got me thinking....please, Canon, make a few lenses that are this small, this light and very sharp (and please, not too much barrel distortion). I don't care if they are fast; I don't care if they have IS; I don't care if they are plastic; I don't even care what they cost. Instead of trying to make the ultimate 600mm f/2.8, how about the ultimate 28mm f/2.8? I know you can do it.

Some of reservations people have in their reviews are right--the lens is slightly noisy, it does sometimes hunt a little for focus, and it is only 1:2 magnification, not 1:1. But despite that, I love it. I have found that it is a great lens, particularly for the price. It has good optics, it is a nice length for a lot of macro work (yes, you have to get closer with a relatively short lens, but depth of field in macro shots is hard enough with a lens this long, let along a longer one), and it generally focuses plenty fast enough. Some people have complained that the noise of the focus would scare off insects, etc., but I have not had that experience at all. I have gotten up close to lots of bugs, like bees and wasps, and they don't respond to the focusing at all. [...] If you are concerned about skittish critters, the issue is not the slight noise of the lens; it's how close you have to get to them with any 50mm or 60mm lens. So unless you decide you need a long macro lens or want to spend a lot more money, this may be a very good choice for you. And keep in mind that if you have a consumer-level SLR, the effective length of this lens (compared to the old 35mm standard) is about 90 mm.