When my fifteenth birthday came around, I wanted just one thing: a real camera. My father gave me his treasured Minolta 201 camera body, a handful of filters, and three lenses. The lenses were a 35mm wide-angle, a 50mm “standard” lens, and a 135mm telephoto. “But you’re only going to need the 50mm,” Dad said. Why? “Because it mimics the human eye. It makes your photos look natural.” Of course, I immediately grabbed the 35mm wide-angle, ignoring him. I liked the wide-angle because I could take photos of people without having to back up, or bother composing the frame (walking around to set up a photo? Total bummer!). I shot a lot of expired Agfachrome (on mega-discount at the local camera shop) with that combination, and even picked up a 28mm wider-angle lens, which suffered from chromatic aberration around the edges.
About a year into my teenage camera adventure, I decided to try out the 50mm that had come so highly recommended. And guess what? Dad was right — that lens made things look “real” in a way that I hadn’t expected. It was far better for taking pictures of people, making their faces look natural. Also, the 50mm happened to be a faster lens, which finally allowed me to explore and begin to understand depth of field — something I hadn’t done with my wide-angle, which I kept locked at f/3.5 (the best it could do). I was shocked to look back at my older photos and see how my wide-angle lens (and the f/3.5 aperture) affected the look of the photos — it was a distinctive look, but I was no longer sure it was a good one.
Photographer Gary Voth has posted a lovely article on the 50mm lens: The Forgotten Lens. Here’s a sample:
The 50mm lens is called a “normal” or “standard” lens because the way it renders perspective closely matches that of the human eye. Consequently, images made with a 50mm lens have a natural and uncontrived look. This is the lens that likely would have come with your camera had you bought it 10-15 years ago. Before falling to its current level of disfavor, the 50mm lens had a long and distinguished pedigree. For many years the defining documentary instrument of the 20th century was the small format rangefinder camera (Leica, Contax, Nikon, Canon) with 50mm lens. Some of the world’s best-known photographers such as Henri Cartier-Bresson and Ralph Gibson made virtually their entire careers with this combination.
Check out the rest of the article for a primer on camera lenses, and why you might not want super-zoom or super-wide-angle.
Link via 43 Folders.
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This is very timely. I have an old Canon A-1 film camera. My pride and joy was the 50mm 1.4 lens. I had two other zoom lenses, but the 50mm made the best images. I have since been using primarily point and shoot digital cameras and now am looking at digital prosumer or SLR cameras. The lenses are big disappointments.
posted by Stew on 9-7-2007 at 12:46 pm
yeah, I got a hand-me-down pentax from my dad along with all his old lenses, including a really sharp 50mm 1.8, which I’ve been using on my pentax digital slr. amazing how well the old glass holds up, and it’s miles above the kit 18-55mm zoom lens.
posted by monkeypox on 9-7-2007 at 1:14 pm
When I was a starving college student, I scrimped and saved to buy a gray market (direct from Hong Kong) Canon SLR, but I got it with the f1.4 normal lens. Zoom lenses of the early 70s left much to be desired, and the normal lens let us shoot in “available dark” as well as explore the wonders of composition and selective focus. Foot zooms worked!
I thought Canon had actually marketed an f0.95 normal lens, but it was probably more for marketing wars than for using.
posted by Tom on 9-7-2007 at 1:24 pm
Wow, man! The link to the rest of the article fades in like a dissolve! Howzzat?
posted by Johnny Cat on 9-7-2007 at 5:10 pm
Johnny Cat – huh, thanks for pointing that out. It looks like Mr. Voth’s site is using a ‘blendTrans’ Javascript function upon loading his page. My browser doesn’t support it, so I didn’t notice anything unusual. :)
posted by Higgins on 9-7-2007 at 5:17 pm
I bought a Canon T70 in 1984; it came with a 1.4 50mm lens, and that was the only lens I used until I bought a 75-200 zoom lens for it. I found that the 75-200 worked well for some situations but I found myself going back to the 50 more and more.
I miss my SLR, but I grew tired of paying for film & processing, then scanning the photos. A digital SLR doesn’t fit my budget now (nor will it until I get a couple of kids through college), so I’ll bide my time until it does.
Am I the only one who remembers promises of “digital film” to retrofit 35mm cameras to take digital photos? That would be such a sweet alternative, and keep a lot of very serviceable old camera gear in use. Bother our disposable society.
posted by Dave on 9-7-2007 at 9:31 pm
I recently purchased a very good digital in my long desire to learn about photography and capture the images my eyes were constantly composing.
I really am ignorant at this point and barely grasped alot of the info in the article, but the images were compelling and enough to sell me on the idea.
I still can’t understand how such a lens could fall out of favor. I mean, I know that with digital pianos (which possess the obvious advantage of not being the size or price of real ones)the goal has always been to replicate the sound of a real piano. Now, they even replicate the feel of a real piano with hammer action and weighted keys. And this applies to consumer models as well as pro.
Maybe it’s just that every schmuck on the block will buy a camera whereas few will buy a musical instrument.
I feel like I’ve been cheated.
posted by Bassman on 9-8-2007 at 8:25 am
I have a hand-me-down (my mother to my aunt to my uncle to me) Minolta SRT200 (almost identical to your 201, minus the hot shoe and self-timer). Despite the fact that I have a digital SLR that I paid way too much for, I take 90% of my pictures with the 30-year-old minolta, almost always with the 50mm lens it shipped with in the 70s. The pictures it takes are way too good to switch to the digital.
Also, I’m pretty sure I could throw the thing against a brick wall and it would come out of it unscathed.
posted by Eric on 9-8-2007 at 8:56 pm
Higgins, Dad was right. Sometimes it sucks how much you realize Dad was right as you get older.
Long time ago, I took a photography class at an overseas base; the teacher was an old salty Navy Chief Warrant Officer — a photojournalist for the Navy with about 30 years under his belt. He was tolerant of our explorations with extreme lenses (someone bought a fisheye lens and turned in assignments with it), and at the end of the course, after we’d badgered him endlessly to “put up or shut up” by showing us his portfolio, he did. He gave that he worked almost exclusively at 50mm (though he told us that 57mm is closest to the human eye), and his work was insanely great. 50mm made him look at depth-of-field, composition, shutter speed and so on, and by limiting himself, he became quite a disciplined photographer.
posted by TikiPundit on 9-9-2007 at 8:24 am
Great post — and good point! Ever since I switched from my old pentax SLR (w/ 50mm lens more or less permanently attached) to digital, my photos have way less personality.
posted by Ransom on 9-9-2007 at 9:13 am
There is one thing to add to this article. A 50mm lens isn’t a 50mm lens on digital SLRs. What I mean is, due to the smaller imaging sensors in most digital SLRs, a 50mm lens on a digital SLR gives the field of view approximately equivalent to an 80mm lens on a film SLR. A 35mm lens on a digital SLR gives approximately the same field of view as a 50mm on a film SLR. Unless of course you have one of the full-field sensor digital SLRs, available in a couple Canon models and one of the new Nikon models too, I believe.
posted by JW on 9-10-2007 at 2:14 pm