It is a lens you can shoot with all day or easily keep tucked away when needed. It is also an inexpensive investment that promises to improve your photography without weighing down your camera or your bag. It is also lightweight and fast at focusing, making it an overall pleasurable experience.Ī 50mm lens is often referred to as a “nifty fifty” because it is so versatile and easy to use. ![]() You can keep this lens on your camera all day and rarely find a situation where you wished you had a different lens. A 50mm lens, on the other hand, is excellent at portrait, street, and landscape photography. Likewise, telephoto lenses (200-300mm) are excellent choices for photographing wildlife or sporting events, but not so good when shooting street photography where you may not want to draw attention to yourself. Working with shallow depth of field also requires developing accuracy with focus, which is an added bonus that will benefit all of your photography.Ī wide-angle lens (less than 35mm) is perfect for landscape photography, but you wouldn’t want to use one for taking portraits as it can cause unwanted distortion. For around $200, you can buy a 50mm f/1.8 lens (or 35mm f/1.8 for crop cameras) that will provide some excellent shallow depth of field. While you can find lenses out there such as Nikon’s 24-70mm f/2.8, which offers a good focal range and can produce a shallow depth of field, it’s also around $1800. However, your kit lens probably only goes down to about f/3.5, whereas a truly shallow depth of field begins around f/2.8. This can be achieved by using a low f-stop on the lens. When you see a portrait, for instance, that has a softly blurred background behind the subject, this is caused by using a shallow depth of field. Having a fixed focal length also requires you to spend a little more time composing each shot, which is never a bad thing. Likewise, if you need to back up to see something more fully, you’d be doing the same with a 50mm lens. If, without a camera, you need to get closer to something to get a better look at it, you’d do the same with a 50mm lens (or equivalent) mounted on your camera. The reason this is a good focal length to train your eye is that there is nothing to get used to. ![]() Keep in mind though, that if you have a crop camera, such as a Nikon D5300 or a Canon 70D, then it is the 35mm lens that is roughly equivalent to 50mm on a full-frame camera (a 50mm lens is still a GREAT choice for a crop). With all of the choices out there (wide-angle, telephoto, macro), why should you pick up a 50mm and why should it be the second thing you buy? There are several reasons.Ī 50mm lens comes the closest to capturing what you eye naturally sees, so many beginning photographers find it a good training lens. A lot of advice tells you to invest in lenses, but which one should you start with? If you look into many professional photographer’s bags, you’ll come across the answer-a 50mm prime lens. ![]() Now you’re starting to think about what to buy next. You’ve been playing with the features, getting to know the camera and the lens. So you’ve picked up your first DSRL along with a kit lens. We may not know that the lens that produced them was a nifty fifty, but we are all used to photographs that have the perspective and geometry of this lens.A 50mm f/1.8 should be a beginner's 2nd lens That story was repeated millons of times, right round the world.īarnack’s choice of the 50mm and the availability and (comparative) cheapness of 50mm lenses from there on was instrumental in creating the “look” that we associate with classic photographs of the 35mm era. ![]() When I bought my first SLR, it was the Leica-influenced Pentax ME Super. My first interchangeable lens camera was a Russian Leica copy – a Zorki 4K – and it came with a 50mm. Other manufacturers started making cameras to the same 35mm film standard as the Leica, and they sold 50mm lenses as “the standard lens”. The idea and Leica cameras caught on – both with more “artistic” photographers like Cartier-Bresson, and with the press. When Ernst Leitz and Oskar Barnack turned 35mm cinema film round and put it in a tiny body to create the first Leica prototype, the lens they put on the front was a 50mm.
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