Thoughts on the 50mm focal lenght

Roger Hicks · Jun 29, 2007

John Curran said:
I've seen the work of many photojournalists who covered the Vietnam war with a 50mm lense on a 35mm SLR. An amazing feat looking back from this age of zooms. My father shot for Newsday throughout the 60's on primarily a 50mm lense, and he was shooting Tri-x.

Dear John,

Sure. I'm just saying that 50mm was a long way from universal -- and got further from universal as 35mm lenses got faster.

Cheers,

Roger

film_guy · Jun 29, 2007

Wow, lots of insightful posts in this thread, and I totally agree with John's post about the photojournalists of the Vietnam war making amazing photos with just a 50mm, compared to photojournalists nowadays having a 16-35mm, 24-70mm and 70-200mm telephoto zooms as their bread and butter gear.

A lot of times I wish I could relive the 70s again, and started doing photography back then, instead of starting in the mid 90s.

Christopher Walrath · Jun 29, 2007

I love my MD Rokkor-X 50mm f1.4. Especially on my Minolta Bellows III.

Shawn Mielke · Jun 30, 2007

I recently shot for one solid year with the 50mm focal length exclusively. It is my preferred focal length. I need to be forced by practical photographic circumstances to shoot anything wider, such as while in the many medinas of Morocco this last winter. Narrow corridor after narrow corridor and it became very clear that the 35mm focal would have served me better.
But I think that it's very important to not be dominated by effects while shooting, and to achieve a spiritual connection with the subject and it's environment. Therefore, the less perspective distortion the better and the more the inner vision is allowed to come out, imo. Which isn't to say that aesthetics are less important to me than content. To me they are irrevocably combined.
Mainly though, practical considerations pertain to handheld shooting technique and the 50mm allows the shutterspeeds to be reasonably slow. While shooting humans engaged in social activities, 1/30th of a second is about as slow as I like to go without seriously losing fidelity and 1/50th is very close to 1/30th.

removed account4 · Jun 30, 2007

i use a 50mm on a 35mm camera more and more.
i use others as well, but the 50 just feels right sometimes.
i am on a trip now, and i have 2 35mm cameras and a 4x5 with me.
the little cameras are mounted with 50's, and the big one has a 6ish"

j

wheelygirl · Jul 1, 2007

OOOhhh, how I love my "double-nickels" lens, that being a 55 mm f/ 1.7. As I understand it, this lens was what all Minolta 35mm SRTs were 'packed' with. I do, on occasion, shoot with my 35mm f/2.8. And until I can get the "hang" of my 200 mm f/3.8 lens [a monster, but so cool!!], it isn't used often.

ehparis · Jul 3, 2007

For me it's a tossup between the Nikkor 35mm f1.4 and 50mm f1.4. Lately my F3 has been mostly wearing the 35mm.

matti · Jul 3, 2007

I almost feel a bit guilty that I never use my Summicron 35 on my Leica. I only use the Summicron 50 mm lens. Actually, I just bought and greased up a 85 mm Jupiter lens. Maybe that will get some use as well, if I can learn how to focus 5 cm in front of the subject or fix the lens...
/matti

bruce terry · Jul 3, 2007

The 50mm is my perfect compromise, the only way to go working with just a single body and lens. Agree with a previous post that carrying a 35+body and a med-tele+body is about ideal, if you are comfortable with a little extra stuff, which I'm not, in my obsessive quest for simplicity.

CraigH · Jul 3, 2007

I usually use my Rokkor 50mm f 1.4 most of the time. I like it wide open.

Craig

Thanasis · Jul 4, 2007

I have a Nikon 50mm f/1.8 AI on my F5 which i absolutely love to shoot with. It's my default lens. It's the lens I use when I take my camera with me for no particular purpose other than to have it there when there is something interesting to shoot. It's small, It's sharp, it's well built and gives great results at all apertures. It's probably the most versatile of all my lenses for the things I shoot.

It's no replacement for a wide-angle and I prefer the 105mm for portraits but I have used it as a wide (stopped down to f/16 for extra depth and it still sings) and for portraits with excellent results.

wayne naughton · Jul 4, 2007

it's the MD rokkor x 35mm f1.8 for me with a tele rokkor md 135mm f2.8 in my pocket, just in case. perfect..... i've been playing with other focal lengths and i've been having some success with a minolta af 20mm f2.8 working in crowds and restricted space (attached to a little dynax 4 would you believe...it goes in my other pocket <G>) i find the 50mm pretty useless, neither flesh nor fowl for me out on the street. BUT the minolta 50mm F1.7 makes a great portrait lens on the digital tho....heck of a lot cheaper than a 85mm <grin>

w

kunihiko · Jul 4, 2007

I used to like 50mm for walk-around shots most of the time, but prefer wider one in a crowded place. It's easy to be in a crowded place here in Tokyo, you know.
Lately, I became to prefer 35mm over 50mm. Where I live is not as dangerous as Vietnam war, so I can step closer to the subject.

benjiboy · Jul 4, 2007

Roger Hicks said:
I don't entirely agree. Historically, a 'standard' lens was one that was close to the diagonal of the negative, and with 35mm the 'long standard' became the norm because it's easier to make a reasonably fast (f/3.5) 50mm lens that covers the frame well than to make a 43mm. If you want faster still (f/2, then f/1.5) with full-frame coverage, 50mm is MUCH easier. Anything longer, on the other hand, soon gets bulky if it is at all fast. In other words, it was cheap'n'easy.

Degrees of enlargement also enter in to it, and I'd argue that a 35mm is at least as 'standard' as a 50mm, while 40mm is closer still. As for 'the most generally useful', I'd disagree completely; I find a fast 35 much more generally useful, and I am not alone in that. As I said above, my 'standard' lens is a 35/1.4.

Then again, my favourite 'standard' on the Nikon F was the 58/1.4 -- like many ultra-fast lenses for reflexes, even longer than 50mm for similar reasons to why 50mm (or 2 inch) lenses were normally supplied instead of 43mm, 40mm or 35mm.

Cheers,

Roger

Roger, although I agree entirely that different people have different preferences, and that you find a "fast 35mm much more generally useful" I think you'll agree that Until fairly recently, and the advent of zooms, most 35mm SLR s were supplied with 50mm lenses, and if you talk to most photographers about your standard lens on a SLR they will will assume that's what you are referring to.

copake_ham · Jul 4, 2007

Geez, am I confused. I've always thought that the 50mm lens was considered "normal" (a.k.a. "standard", apparently) because on 35mm film it focuses an image that is closest in proportion to that seen by the naked eye?

In fact, that's why I thought it was called "normal".

kunihiko · Jul 4, 2007

Naked eyes are kinda like a zoom lens. Looking at girlfriend's smiling face my eyes have focal length longer than 50mm. When I was at mountain side, sit back and gazing quiet view, my eyes are wider.
Everybody has their own comfortable angle of view. Some say its about 50mm, other say 35mm fits. And it changes, it depends on the subject which being seen and how you see the subject.

MattKing · Jul 5, 2007

Part of the confusion arises from the fact that most of us have two eyes. Together, the field of view isn't all that far from a 50 mm lens on 35mm film. Individually, each eye has a field of view similar to a 35mm lens on 35mm format. Unfortunately (with respect to this question), our eyes also come with a brain attached, which scans and zooms as well.

Personally, I must like squinting, because 35mm seems most comfortable to me.

I wonder what the users of stereo cameras have to say about this.

Matt

benjiboy · Jul 5, 2007

copake_ham said:
Geez, am I confused. I've always thought that the 50mm lens was considered "normal" (a.k.a. "standard", apparently) because on 35mm film it focuses an image that is closest in proportion to that seen by the naked eye?

In fact, that's why I thought it was called "normal".

The 50mm lens is actually a bit long for the format George, the ideal should be about 43mm the diagonal dimension of the 24x36mm frame .

Roger Hicks · Jul 7, 2007

benjiboy said:
Roger, although I agree entirely that different people have different preferences, and that you find a "fast 35mm much more generally useful" I think you'll agree that Until fairly recently, and the advent of zooms, most 35mm SLR s were supplied with 50mm lenses, and if you talk to most photographers about your standard lens on a SLR they will will assume that's what you are referring to.

You are of course absolutely right, and I would not argue for a moment. It's just a question of why 50mm was standard, and what 'standard' means.

Cheers,

Roger

HerrBremerhaven · Jul 7, 2007

I always understood that the 50mm was considered standard because that was the lens that came with most cameras. We might consider that in the last ten years, a zoom is a standard lens.

Ciao!

Gordon Moat
Dead Link Removed

copake_ham · Jul 7, 2007

Roger Hicks said:
You are of course absolutely right, and I would not argue for a moment. It's just a question of why 50mm was standard, and what 'standard' means.

Cheers,

Roger

Actually, for me, it is only in this thread that I have learned the term "standard" as applying to a 50mm lens.

I understood it to be a "normal" lens that, with the qualifications of prior posters considered, most closely rendered a photograph similar to what the naked eye would see looking at the same composition.

I do know that with Nikon gear, at least, going way back to their beginnings, the "standard package" was a S-model RF with a 5.0cm/1.4f lens. That is why even today, these lenses, from various production runs, remain the most common available.

John Curran · Jul 8, 2007

copake_ham said:
I understood it to be a "normal" lens that, with the qualifications of prior posters considered, most closely rendered a photograph similar to what the naked eye would see looking at the same composition.

This was my understanding too, as it relates to depth perception. Wide angle lenses stretch the scene, telephotos compress the scene. I was taught that 48-55mm lenses reproduce depth perception in a way similar to that percieved by the human eye. It has nothing to do with approximating FOV.

Likewise, a 105mm lense is a popular portrait lense in 35mm format because it is a small telephoto that introduces a very slight amount of scene compression that is generally considered flattering to the face.

I think copake_ham tried to express this in an earlier post.

ehparis · Jul 8, 2007

Roger Hicks said:
Disputable. What do you actually mean by this? Too much depends on the size of the print and the viewing distance.

I wondered how long it would be before the 'angle of view of the eye' thing came up...

Cheers,

Roger (www.rogerandfrances.com)

I wondered how long it would be until this comment came up.

In the 1960's and 1970's there was a popular school of thought that said the 80-90mm focal length was more "normal" than 50mm because humans actually focused on a subject in this focal length.

My "normal" lenses are my Nikkor 45mm f2.8 GN and 50mm f1.4 lenses. While I use other focal lengths like the 24, 28, 35, 85, and 105 my F3HP and Nikon F generally will be found wearing one of these two lenses.

An aside: The War in Vietnam (1964-1975) was photographed with the Nikon F and 50mm f1.4.

ehparis · Jul 8, 2007

film_guy said:
Wow, lots of insightful posts in this thread, and I totally agree with John's post about the photojournalists of the Vietnam war making amazing photos with just a 50mm, compared to photojournalists nowadays having a 16-35mm, 24-70mm and 70-200mm telephoto zooms as their bread and butter gear.

A lot of times I wish I could relive the 70s again, and started doing photography back then, instead of starting in the mid 90s.

It was the best of times and the worst of times, but it was never a moveable feast like Hemingway's 1920's, but it was interesting. In photography the Nikon F replaced the venerable Leica rangefinder as the camera most used for photojournalism. It typically wore a 50mm Nikkor 1.4.

Leica fans may not like it but this was fact. Every night you could sit at the dinner table and watch the evening news with Walter Cronkite and the war footage invariably included one or more still photographers with Nikon F's dangling from their necks.

Roger Hicks · Jul 8, 2007

ehparis said:
... Every night you could sit at the dinner table and watch the evening news with Walter Cronkite and the war footage invariably included one or more still photographers with Nikon F's dangling from their necks.

Very true. You also saw many who had both Ms and Fs; Ms for wide-angle and standard (35+50) and even up to 90, F for tele (135 or 200). I'm not trying to rewrite history for the benefit of Leica fanciers, and I do not deny for an instant that the F substantially replaced the M, but the M survived alongside the F astonishingly well.

As for the angle-of-view argument, if you take the 'angle subtended' line, then 50mm is a slightly 'long standard' for a whole-plate (6-1/2 x 8-1/2 inches) while 35mm is a slightly 'wide standard' for 8x10 inch at the same viewing distance. The multiplication factor on the diagonals is about 1.3x; 35mm to 50mm is about 1.45x.

The importance of magnification factor and viewing distance is of paramount importance in establishing 'magic distances' for apparently natural perspective. Classically, a 'normal' or 'standard' lens gave 'natural' perspective when viewed from the f.l. of the lens. Obviously no-one is going to view a 35mm contact from 43mm, but a 6x enlargement from 43mm implies a viewing distance of 258mm or just over 10 inches, often regarded as a 'normal' viewing distance for a small print.

A whole-plate with a modest margin would imply at most a 5x (5x7 inch) blow-up, with a viewing distance of 210mm (roughly 8 inches) for a 43mm 'standard' lens. Move out to 10 inches and this implies 43 x 1.25 or near enough 50-55mm. Now do a full-page magazine shot, diagonal up to about 14 inches, and again from the same viewing distance, the 'standard' or 'natural' f.l. is 0.7x or 35mm...

These numbers are very rough indeed, by memory and mental arithmetic after a well-lubricated Sunday dinner (I'm currently enjoying a digestif of Croatian brandy, of all things) but I think they hold water. No doubt if they don't, I'll be reminded.

Cheers,

Roger

Thoughts on the 50mm focal lenght

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