I've owned this lens for about four months now and it continues to baffle me every time I use it, regardless of the price (which only makes it more confusing). From portraits of my family to action shots of my dog and wildlife/nature photography, this lens does it all and makes the rest of my kit look like a waste of space. The f/1.4 setting simply takes beautiful photos, but is a bit prohibitive due to the extremely shallow depth of field. When I focus the lens on my dog's nose, her eyes are completely blurry. This makes it a great frame for artistic use (particularly great for capturing insects, flowers, and other macro images), but not as useful when photographing people or landscapes. Crank it up to around f/2.5 or so - still below almost every other lens available - and the options explode. Children, animals, bugs, flowers, wildlife - the photos are beautiful, the depth of field is still dramatic enough to clearly distinguish the subject of your photo from the foreground/background and the lens still lets in enough light for crisp, take low-noise photos in low light conditions. It also has very little lens and color distortion compared to the lenses that came with my camera. I highly recommend this lens and shoot in RAW only. The photos you receive after a bit of post-processing are suitable for 3-5' wide canvas prints. For the price, there's no excuse not to own this lens. Buy it and you're guaranteed to love photography even more than you already do. FYI I have a Canon T3i body and up until this lens they used 18-55mm zoom and 55-250mm zoom lenses. Not comparable to this one, although I still have to use the 18-55mm when I need the wider angle (mainly indoor family shots). That's the only real 'con' with this lens - which you know you're getting once you know what a 50mm lens is - it's very difficult to get full shots indoors. This isn't the lens you want if you're taking photos at a party or taking a lot of family photos indoors.