What is your reason for prefering the most complete lens - the 50mm prime [?]

Dartmoor Dave · 10-01-2021, 01:57 AM

Looking back through this thread, it seems that most of us have been talking about "50mm" in terms of the angle of view of a 50mm lens on a 24x36mm full frame camera. But from reading the original post again, I'm not sure that's what the OP had in mind, since he talks about 50mm primes in comparison to the APS-C only 18-55mm.

So was the OP really thinking about 50mm lenses mostly in terms of them being sharp, fast primes that you can get for a very reasonable price? In those terms, then yes, 50mm primes have got a heck of a lot in their favour. But in terms of the angle of view of a 50mm lens on a full frame camera, I'm going to stick with my original opinion -- I think it's the most boring option around.

noelpolar · 10-02-2021, 05:37 AM

mmmm.... I quite like my 50 on my K1..... other than my 150-450 it would be my favourite lens (it's K 50/1.2)... I have the 31, 43, 77... a 20, 85 70-200 blah blah.... all nice lenses etc etc.

I find it hard to say why it is so ... for me. I just do hobby stuff that I want to do.

Anyway... last year I spent a week with just the 50 (for the most part) whilst meandering around the Flinders Ranges.... and really was very happy.... one of the key things I think a 50 forces, is that it requires you to make/find a worthy subject without the benefit of bending reality (ie perspective, compression etc).

In the end.... if I see somethimg normalish.... 31mm to 77mm would mostly get you a good shot with a bit of effort most days anyhow.... as a hobbiest.

texandrews · 10-02-2021, 06:59 AM

Originally posted by biz-engineer

Forget about most posts before mine, they mostly miss the point of what a 50mm lens is about. It's very simple. 50mm lens on FF will take pictures that look like what your eyes see without having a camera, that is same ratio of sizes/distances represented in the picture as the ratio of sizes/distances your bare eyes saw in the scene before you decided to take a picture of what you saw. So, 50mm is not the most complete at all, but it's the easiest lens to use for beginners or people who don't have a clue about perspectives and distances or don't want to bother dealing with perspective distortions in their compositions. Basically, when you use a 50mm lens on FF, you can rely on your own eye to seeing and selecting what you want to photograph. You don't even need to look thru the viewfinder to see if what you want to photograph will look good on a picture, you can compose with your eyes directly, it's very easy because the picture will look like what your eyes have seen. With 50mm lens, what you see with your eyes is what you get on the picture. But easy doesn't mean it'll produce the most exciting photographs, on the contrary, images produced by 50mm on FF are often unexciting because that's the look that all people can see without any camera just using their eyes, and what makes a photographs compelling is when it shows something that people aren't used to see in the real world. Now, consider a 20mm lens, the picture taken with that lens will never look like what you saw with your bare eyes, with the 20mm lens the closer element in the picture will look larger, and the farther element in the picture will look smaller than what your eyes see in the real world, so , the 20mm lens requires to compose thru the viewfinder, while the 50mm doesn't.

A caveat here. Yes, the fifties on FF show the objects with the least amount of perspective distortion, but they don't show what the eyes see for 2 reasons: one is that they flatten the scene and the other is that while the perspective distortions are minimized, the scene is very much clipped from a peripheral vision standpoint. This latter is very obvious, the former less so. But the former is easily seen from students/artists copying photographs to make a drawing or painting. Drawing or painting from life will yield a subtly different image than copying the photo and with an accomplished artist may yield more natural results (to the viewer's mind, at least). The better artists (I'm thinking Degas, for instance) who use photos in their practice (who aren't involved in a conceptual enterprise involving photos) usually use them as a jumping off point only.

biz-engineer · 10-02-2021, 07:54 AM - **2 Likes**

Originally posted by texandrews

A caveat here. Yes, the fifties on FF show the objects with the least amount of perspective distortion, but they don't show what the eyes see for 2 reasons: one is that they flatten the scene and the other is that while the perspective distortions are minimized, the scene is very much clipped from a peripheral vision standpoint.

I never said that the 50mm sees as wide as the eyes, nor stereo-graphic vision, but it sees the same relative distances and proportions, and that's really all. Which means, I can stick a 50mm lens on my K1, walk around and if I see something interesting to shoot (with my eyes, without looking thru the VF), I shoot it and what I get on the picture if what I saw. I did an experiment photographing streets at various FL, to confirm that 50mm is really what show in pictures the proportions seen by my eyes, and no it's not 43mm, it's really 50mm! BTW, with a 50mm lens, what we see in the viewfinder doesn't even match the proportions we see with bare eyes, due to the 0.7x viewfinder magnification (instead of 1x), 35mm through the 0.7x viewfinder show proportions similar to naked eye view. So, neither OVF nor EVF show what you get... contrary to what folks have said regarding how EVF is WYSIWYG, that's just not true because EVF magnifications aren't 1.0x.. so you never get what you see in the VF regardless if it's optical or electronic.

Last edited by biz-engineer; 10-02-2021 at 08:02 AM.

Jonathan Mac · 10-06-2021, 09:02 AM - **3 Likes**

I agree that a fifty-ish-mm fast prime is the most useful lens to have. I'm not sure what "most complete" means. I don't care if it's 50mm or 55mm or 58mm, though I do find my FA 43mm a bit on the short side for my liking when I use it on film. On APS-C my favourite focal length is 35mm, which works out around 52.5mm equivalent.

I have many, many lenses and I shoot at many different focal lengths but if I had to choose just one focal length to use for the rest of my time it would certainly be a 50 to 58mm for film or a 35mm for APS-C digital. I could do at least 80% of what I like to photograph with that single focal length, though I'd say I can work with anything from around 40mm to 60mm equivalent for most of it. It's the closest there is to a perfect focal length with the added bonuses that almost all of them are good to very good, they provide a nice fast aperture and (save the most modern monstrosities) are very compact.

All of this depends on taste and how you like to shoot but I don't see how what is almost certainly the most flexible single focal length around could be boring. I find super-wide angle landscapes boring, and bog-standard head-and-shoulder portraits with an 85-135mm lens boring.

10-02-2021, 05:37 AM	#47
noelpolar Veteran Member Join Date: Oct 2013 Location: Goolwa, SA Photos: Gallery Posts: 4,310	mmmm.... I quite like my 50 on my K1..... other than my 150-450 it would be my favourite lens (it's K 50/1.2)... I have the 31, 43, 77... a 20, 85 70-200 blah blah.... all nice lenses etc etc. I find it hard to say why it is so ... for me. I just do hobby stuff that I want to do. Anyway... last year I spent a week with just the 50 (for the most part) whilst meandering around the Flinders Ranges.... and really was very happy.... one of the key things I think a 50 forces, is that it requires you to make/find a worthy subject without the benefit of bending reality (ie perspective, compression etc). In the end.... if I see somethimg normalish.... 31mm to 77mm would mostly get you a good shot with a bit of effort most days anyhow.... as a hobbiest. Last edited by noelpolar; 10-02-2021 at 05:43 AM.

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10-01-2021, 01:57 AM	#46
Dartmoor Dave Pentaxian Join Date: Aug 2012 Location: Dartmoor, UK Photos: Gallery Posts: 3,882	Looking back through this thread, it seems that most of us have been talking about "50mm" in terms of the angle of view of a 50mm lens on a 24x36mm full frame camera. But from reading the original post again, I'm not sure that's what the OP had in mind, since he talks about 50mm primes in comparison to the APS-C only 18-55mm. So was the OP really thinking about 50mm lenses mostly in terms of them being sharp, fast primes that you can get for a very reasonable price? In those terms, then yes, 50mm primes have got a heck of a lot in their favour. But in terms of the angle of view of a 50mm lens on a full frame camera, I'm going to stick with my original opinion -- I think it's the most boring option around.

10-02-2021, 06:59 AM	#48
texandrews Moderator Join Date: Apr 2014 Location: Baltimore Photos: Albums Posts: 3,390	Originally posted by biz-engineer Forget about most posts before mine, they mostly miss the point of what a 50mm lens is about. It's very simple. 50mm lens on FF will take pictures that look like what your eyes see without having a camera, that is same ratio of sizes/distances represented in the picture as the ratio of sizes/distances your bare eyes saw in the scene before you decided to take a picture of what you saw. So, 50mm is not the most complete at all, but it's the easiest lens to use for beginners or people who don't have a clue about perspectives and distances or don't want to bother dealing with perspective distortions in their compositions. Basically, when you use a 50mm lens on FF, you can rely on your own eye to seeing and selecting what you want to photograph. You don't even need to look thru the viewfinder to see if what you want to photograph will look good on a picture, you can compose with your eyes directly, it's very easy because the picture will look like what your eyes have seen. With 50mm lens, what you see with your eyes is what you get on the picture. But easy doesn't mean it'll produce the most exciting photographs, on the contrary, images produced by 50mm on FF are often unexciting because that's the look that all people can see without any camera just using their eyes, and what makes a photographs compelling is when it shows something that people aren't used to see in the real world. Now, consider a 20mm lens, the picture taken with that lens will never look like what you saw with your bare eyes, with the 20mm lens the closer element in the picture will look larger, and the farther element in the picture will look smaller than what your eyes see in the real world, so , the 20mm lens requires to compose thru the viewfinder, while the 50mm doesn't. A caveat here. Yes, the fifties on FF show the objects with the least amount of perspective distortion, but they don't show what the eyes see for 2 reasons: one is that they flatten the scene and the other is that while the perspective distortions are minimized, the scene is very much clipped from a peripheral vision standpoint. This latter is very obvious, the former less so. But the former is easily seen from students/artists copying photographs to make a drawing or painting. Drawing or painting from life will yield a subtly different image than copying the photo and with an accomplished artist may yield more natural results (to the viewer's mind, at least). The better artists (I'm thinking Degas, for instance) who use photos in their practice (who aren't involved in a conceptual enterprise involving photos) usually use them as a jumping off point only.

10-02-2021, 07:54 AM - 2 Likes	#49
biz-engineer Pentaxian Join Date: Feb 2015 Photos: Gallery Posts: 12,231	Originally posted by texandrews A caveat here. Yes, the fifties on FF show the objects with the least amount of perspective distortion, but they don't show what the eyes see for 2 reasons: one is that they flatten the scene and the other is that while the perspective distortions are minimized, the scene is very much clipped from a peripheral vision standpoint. I never said that the 50mm sees as wide as the eyes, nor stereo-graphic vision, but it sees the same relative distances and proportions, and that's really all. Which means, I can stick a 50mm lens on my K1, walk around and if I see something interesting to shoot (with my eyes, without looking thru the VF), I shoot it and what I get on the picture if what I saw. I did an experiment photographing streets at various FL, to confirm that 50mm is really what show in pictures the proportions seen by my eyes, and no it's not 43mm, it's really 50mm! BTW, with a 50mm lens, what we see in the viewfinder doesn't even match the proportions we see with bare eyes, due to the 0.7x viewfinder magnification (instead of 1x), 35mm through the 0.7x viewfinder show proportions similar to naked eye view. So, neither OVF nor EVF show what you get... contrary to what folks have said regarding how EVF is WYSIWYG, that's just not true because EVF magnifications aren't 1.0x.. so you never get what you see in the VF regardless if it's optical or electronic. Last edited by biz-engineer; 10-02-2021 at 08:02 AM.

10-06-2021, 09:02 AM - 3 Likes	#50
Jonathan Mac Pentaxian Join Date: Apr 2009 Location: Madrid, Spain Posts: 10,897	I agree that a fifty-ish-mm fast prime is the most useful lens to have. I'm not sure what "most complete" means. I don't care if it's 50mm or 55mm or 58mm, though I do find my FA 43mm a bit on the short side for my liking when I use it on film. On APS-C my favourite focal length is 35mm, which works out around 52.5mm equivalent. I have many, many lenses and I shoot at many different focal lengths but if I had to choose just one focal length to use for the rest of my time it would certainly be a 50 to 58mm for film or a 35mm for APS-C digital. I could do at least 80% of what I like to photograph with that single focal length, though I'd say I can work with anything from around 40mm to 60mm equivalent for most of it. It's the closest there is to a perfect focal length with the added bonuses that almost all of them are good to very good, they provide a nice fast aperture and (save the most modern monstrosities) are very compact. All of this depends on taste and how you like to shoot but I don't see how what is almost certainly the most flexible single focal length around could be boring. I find super-wide angle landscapes boring, and bog-standard head-and-shoulder portraits with an 85-135mm lens boring.