Kent Wedding Photographer - Canon 35mm f/1.4 lens

I bought the Canon EF 35mm f/1.4 L lens earlier this year and have no regrets for doing so – the image quality from this lens is stunning, in terms of sharpness, colour and contrast.

I wanted a very fast wide angle lens for low-light wedding photography to complement my 85mm f/1.2 L lens. I grappled with the dilemma of whether to buy the 24mm f/1.4 L or 35mm f/1.4 L and decided on the latter as it’s a more general purpose focal length – at 24mm perspective distortion becomes an issue. Although 50mm is regarded as the ‘standard’ focal length I think 35mm corresponds more closely to human vision – or mine at least!

The lens is beautifully constructed but is light. It features ultrasonic motors for rapid, silent focusing and supports full-time manual focus. The lens focuses very quickly in low light and I find it more efficient and reliable than the 24-70 f/2.8 L zoom lens. On the full-frame EOS 5D vignetting (darkening towards the corners of the image) is visible when the lens is wide open (f/1.4) but this is easily corrected in Lightroom or Photoshop. As the aperture is reduced from f/1.4 to f/2.0 there is an increase in sharpness but I regularly shoot at f/1.4 and find the results sufficiently sharp for my purposes.

I process at least 700 wedding shots using Lightroom most weekends on my 30” Apple Cinema Display (which is pretty unforgiving in exposing image flaws) and, as I work through the images in the development module, those from the prime lenses stand out. You would expect this from first principles, on the basis that the optics of the lens should be close-to-perfect for this single focal length, but it is reassuring to see it in practice.

Check out my photography here: Kent wedding photographer