The style of photography we have developed over the past five years has been influenced by a lot different factors: courses we’ve taken, other photographers we admire, and equipment we use, as well as what we see in our artistic eye before we even shoot a photo! I want to focus today on why we have been using prime (or fixed-focal-point) lenses almost exclusively from the very beginning!

• Sharp Focus
  All zoom lenses have a certain focal length where they are the most accurate and sharp when focusing. This is generally at the longer end of the focal length, for instance, the 70-200 will perform better and produce sharper images at 200mm than at 70mm. Prime lenses DON’T HAVE THIS PROBLEM! That’s right, obviously, prime lenses are fixed at the exact focal length where they perform absolutely perfectly!

• Quality of Build
  There are a LOT of moving parts in a zoom lense, which affords a multitude of opportunities for something to go wrong…or for small distortions in the lense to appear. Overall, the quality of a prime lense is superior to that of even the most expensive zoom lenses!

• Aperture Range
  In addition to the image quality, prime lenses offer another advantage over zoom lenses: aperture range. While expensive zooms like the 70-200 have an impressive wide-open end of f2.8, an average prime can open up to f1.4 or even f1.2! This is huge for style! We are notorious for our wide-open shooting style and we accomplish it by using the extreme open-end of our prime lense’s apertures. (This is a tricky art, though, and is hard to accomplish with good results…we’ll be posting soon about this too!). To get extreme compression and shallow depth-of-field, we use the aperture range from f1.2-f2.5 MOST of the time!! 

• Low-Light Performance
  Because prime lenses have wider apertures, they let in more light, which in turn allows us to operate with either a higher shutter speed or a lower ISO…meaning that we have less risk for blur or compromised image quality when working in lower-light situations! This increase in image quality is just another important reason we use prime lenses!
  
  Check back soon for a list of what’s in our bag on a wedding day!!