Photography News Issue 43

Photography News | Issue 43 | absolutephoto.com

Technique 32

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High standards Standard prime lenses used to be the mainstay of photography, then zoom lenses all but took over. But what if returning to a more traditional view could increase your creativity and inspire you to make better pictures?

Words Kingsley Singleton Pictures by Will Cheung and Kingsley Singleton

As a photographer, lenses are your passport to true creativity. Changing lenses alters both your viewof the world, and howyou’re able to shoot it. But while many shooters run straight for the dramatic views supplied by wider or longer options when upgrading, you can also achieve brilliant images with standard focal lengths, which sit between those two. The general description of a standard (or ‘normal’) focal length is one which gives a view that’s similar to the human eye. This is also called a ‘natural view’. But that’s not too helpful without digging into it a little, because for one thing your field of view, even from one eye, is much broader. The idea that at standard focal length things look similar to through the human eye is more to do with perspective: if you shoot and made a print of the scene in front of you, then held it up at arm’s length ‘in the view’, a standard focal length would make it look very similar; but compare this to views fromwide-angle or telephoto optics and they wouldn’t match. The focal lengths that give this effect depends on the size of sensor you’re using (more on which in the Pick the right lens section, below), but broadly you’re looking at 40mm or 50mm on a full-frame camera, and about 30mm on smaller chips like APS-C and Micro Four Thirds (MFT) sensors. Of course, most kit zooms (like a 18-55mm, or 24-70mm) include these focal lengths, but if you pick up a prime lens in these focal lengths, you’ll get greater quality, usually less bulk and wider maximum apertures. With their natural view, these versatile lenses are a great fit with a range of subjects, like candids and street photography, environmental portraits, details and textures, for cropped landscape views, architecture, and, especially when using lenses with wide apertures, low-light shots. In fact, so useful are they, you’ll find the nickname ‘nifty 50’ well deserved.

Pick the right lens Everything you need to know about choosing a standard prime lens PART 1

Like most lens types you can pay very little or a lot for your standard prime lens. Because of featuring fewer moving parts, prime lenses canhave quite a simple construction, so prices start from just over £100 for a typical 50mm f/1.8 to £599 for a Sigma f/1.4 DA HSM Art and can rise to several thousands. So what should you be picking? The general rule of buying the best lens you can afford holds just as true with standard primes. Get a good one and you’ll be able to rely on it for a lifetime while camera bodies you’ll change much more often; as the old saying goes, ‘you date your cameras, but you marry your lenses’. What focal length? First you need to match the focal length of the lens to your camera. On a full-frame DSLR, 50mm lenses are the most popular standard focal length, but due to their smaller sensor sizes, APS-C and Micro

Four Thirds sensor you’ll need a 25mm or 30mm lens to get the same effect. In those cases, you just need to multiply the lens’s focal length by the crop factor of the sensor (1.5x or 1.6x for APS-C and 2x for MFT), and so long as it’s somewhere between 40mm and 50mm, you’ll be in the right ball park. However, because of those crop factors, if you mount a 50mm lens on an APS-C DSLR you’ll be getting something around 75-80mm – longer than standard. How fast do you want to go? Primes afford wider maximum apertures than most zooms, so in that way almost any standard prime lens can be termed ‘fast’ or ‘bright’, but there’s still variation frommodel to model. Taking 50mm lenses as an example, you’ll generally find them in f/1.8, f/1.4 and f/1.2 versions, though wider lenses do exist, like f/1 or f/0.95 models. The brighter the lens, the more it’s likely to cost, too.