My cell phone has become my normal lens. New phones from both Apple and Google take such a good photos that literally all my street photography is shot with them. I'll grab my trusty A7r4 /w either wide or very long variety of lenses if I will be going to some special place etc. with specific purpose of shooting something that is (in my opinion that is) worth recording in the detail only achievable with this gear. But other than some far and few grand landscapes or wildlife, most of my most amazing(?) photos nowadays come from my cell phone. Case in point - was driving last night along the city street and was passing this church/graveyard which just looked amazingly spooky in the dark/fog/street lighting; stopped my car in the middle of the street, rolled down the window, and snapped couple of (raw) photos with the phone before driving away. Because the phone is with me all the time, it has become my new normal lens.
Classic 50mm “Normal” Lens
101–110 of 167 posts
Re: Classic 50mm “Normal” Lens
#102These are still useful on a micro four-thirds body, just not in the way you might expect. With a speed booster, you reverse most of the magnification and throw a huge amount of light on those small sensors. A Nikon 50mm AF-D on a .71x speed booster and an m43 body is a disturbingly fast setup at ~70mm equivalent field of view. All that said, the state-of-the-art fast primes for the m43 systems have left the classic 5…
Modern lenses will always benefit from modern materials, design and manufacturing techniques. That said the benefits of M43 as a format are shrinking with the advent of small compact FF cameras. Your 25mm f/1.2 lens is equivalent (from a field-of-view and depth-of-field standpoint) to a full-frame 50mm f/2.4 lens or thereabouts.
The size of the m43 kit was never the benefit, to me. The first thing I did was add a grip because the Olympus body was too small. Then I added another grip so I can hold it the other way. Now it's as big as any 35mm I owned.
Re: Classic 50mm “Normal” Lens
#103List of Canon 50mm lenses: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_EF_50mm_lens
The cheapest Canon 50mm, EF50mm f/1.8 II, is affectionately called "plastic fantastic" or "nifty fifty" and is super cheap.
Re: Classic 50mm “Normal” Lens
#104If pointing someone to a single "normal" lens as a prime, I'd point them to a 40mm, not a 50. When I work with a 50 (which I very much enjoy; used one yesterday), I find that it is tighter in composition than my normal field of view. The 40 much-better matches my own perception and experience. The 50 is a more-careful tool. 35 is a little wide for me (but perfect for human/photojournalism work). If you want to try ou…
> If pointing someone to a single "normal" lens as a prime, I'd point them to a 40mm, not a 50. The article does have a section on exactly the issue (FOV) you note - it identifies that the 50mm lens is not the same with modern cameras (which have smaller sensors than 35mm film cameras), and recommends a 35mm lens for these cameras. Personally, I have a 35mm prime lens and quite like it, and I think it did help me imp…
There are two issues here. One is just the usual crop factor stuff. Photographers seem to have real problems dealing with this (probably thanks to the original sin of some marketer somewhere), but they have always and will always suffer from that. If you quote focal lengths in "mmeq" (35mm film frame equivalent focal length) then this problem goes into the background and stays there, out of focus, until the next thread of people talking past each other on a photography forum.
The second issue is that the normal lens focal length for a 35mm film frame, by the most common definition, is actually 43mm. There are, of course, other definitions. https://medium.com/ice-cream-geometry/what-is-a-normal-lens-... seems like a good discussion but I admit to having just skimmed it. So neither 35mm nor 50mm is particularly great. My X100V has a 35mmeq prime lens and I often find myself wishing it was a little narrower. (Though of course I might be saying the opposite if it were actually 50mmeq....)
Re: Classic 50mm “Normal” Lens
#105This article was actually published more than 20 years ago, https://web.archive.org/web/20020603153119/http://vothphoto.... Some of its advice is timeless, but its context is back when your phone did not take great pictures. Instead, most people carried around no camera at all, and events went undocumented. Then, among people who decided they wanted to take pictures of wherever they were going, they bought point-and-…
Arguably your phone still doesn’t take great pictures in the situation the author is describing: indoors, medium to low light. In this situation the advice is still timeless, a camera with a 50mm ~f1.4 can create a truly great photo (skills outstanding), while the best phone will still produce a “good” photo.
I have an iPhone 13 Mini and in those conditions it will never take even a good photo. To make anything even half-decent excellent light is needed. When I look online at those articles-ads about phones being great at photography now they use a combination of great light and a boatload of RAW editing.
Plus you need to mind that it’s the standard problem of people saying they don’t hear the fans of their computer, don’t see the tearing in X, and finally don’t see the loads of noise and loss of sharpness in phone photos. Discussing those things is basically futile.
As a side note, a touch screen is never going to be able to compete with the comfort of physical buttons on my DSLR.
Re: Classic 50mm “Normal” Lens
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If pointing someone to a single "normal" lens as a prime, I'd point them to a 40mm, not a 50. The article does have a section on exactly the issue (FOV) you note - it identifies that the 50mm lens is not the same with modern cameras (which have smaller sensors than 35mm film cameras), and recommends a 35mm lens for these cameras. Personally, I have a 35mm prime lens and quite like it, and I think it did help me imp…
There are two issues here. One is just the usual crop factor stuff. Photographers seem to have real problems dealing with this (probably thanks to the original sin of some marketer somewhere), but they have always and will always suffer from that. If you quote focal lengths in "mmeq" (35mm film frame equivalent focal length) then this problem goes into the background and stays there, out of focus, until the next thre…
If Fuji ever makes an X100 with a 50mm-equivalent lens (probably a 35mm f/2), they'll sell a boatload. Quite a few of them will sit on a shelf, though, compared with the 35mm-equivalent X100s of today. You can always crop in, but you can't crop out.
If Fuji did make a 50mm X100, though, I'd be on the list. Ricoh made a great choice by bringing the GR IIIx to market. If I ever jump on the GR train, it'll likely be with that 40mm-equivalent model. Less versatile, but the images that do hit will resonate with me more.
Re: Classic 50mm “Normal” Lens
#107I've been using 3 'L'-series Canon zoom lenses to cover 16mm to 400mm and been very pleased with their performance as an amateur landscape/wildlife photographer having come to grips with their cost and weight. I recently bought an new, inexpensive 50mm/f1.8 lens off E-bay and spent a day shooting flowers at a local municipal rose garden and had an absolute blast. When I loaded my images onto the computer and had my first real chance to review them, I was very impressed. They're tack sharp, great color balance, and absolutely no vignetting in the corners. It's a perfectly usable lens in the right circumstances and I'll find a place for it in my bag.
Re: Classic 50mm “Normal” Lens
#108I have a sack full of just gorgeous Nikon lenses and camera 'backs'. But the backs are all single lens reflex for 35 mm film. I have nothing that uses CCDs (charge coupled devices, solid state, electronic photon captures).
But the lenses are just gorgeous.
Is there any way I can get a modern camera back, electronic, with a CCD or some such photon capture means, etc. that will let me exploit my old lenses, including, right, a just gorgeous 50 mm lens, a 108 mm, a 200 mm, etc.? So, the modern camera back need not have a mirror and, instead, show in the view finder what it sees via its CCD sensors.
Re: Classic 50mm “Normal” Lens
#109I think 35mm is even better, as it's more versatile in both wide and close scenarios (and 40mm is closer to actual human angle of view than 50mm).
Re: Classic 50mm “Normal” Lens
#110The Nifty Fifty is a forgotten lens? Since when?
It's a classic, super cheap and usually very fast prime that's a recommended starter prime on every photography website I've ever visited.