Canon EF II 50mm f1.8 Drop Test.

by jared1April 1^st, 2010

I was shooting a music video on a rooftop with Director Darcy Fray for Reagan Browne’s new song “Goodbye L.A.”
Jason Wawro and I decided to drop Canon’s cheapest lens. The 50mm EF II f1.8 onto a concrete floor to see if it would break apart.  A valid test for cinema applications. Gear gets banged around quite often on film sets. This lens is notorious. It’s plastic mount, noisy focus motor and overall plastic construction, makes this one cheap lens. At around a hundred bucks, you get what you pay for. However, it is a very useful lens. A fast fifty mill is almost a kit essential. I have owned two in my time. After the drop, we found a great use for the parts. It ended up working like a lens baby with in camera aperture control. The Bui Brothers Lan and Vu came to our set to shoot the test. Hunter Kerhart hooked up the edit and shot  “B” Cam for the landing. I would not recommend doing this with any of your own gear. But it worked out well for us, we had fun dropping it and got a cool speciality lens in our kit.