50mm Only

[F.O.V.]

When I was a poor student a nifty 50 was the only lens I had. You do learn your limits.

Lots of photographers use only 50 or 35mm lenses.. Their preference, many go with a short zoom, others like me use a variety of lenses.. At one time primes were the only lenses available unless you paid fortunes for a long zoom. Nowadays most all lenses are great..

 

[petrochemist163 4]

When I was a poor student a nifty 50 was the only lens I had. You do learn your limits.

I started out with just a 50mm, but since then I've learned to enjoy having my cameras see things differently than my eyes do. Hence my obsessions with IR, extreme focal lengths & long exposures...

This doesn't stop me using 50mm equivalents, or 50mm lenses on different crop cameras. To date I've fitted lenses around 50mm to cameras of at least 7 different 'crop' factors from the Pentax Q up to FF. The widest lens used on 5X4 is of uncertain focal length but probably nearer 90mm (~30mm equivalent) something wider would be fun Sadly I can't afford a 50mm that has enough coverage for 5X4.

One of my 50mm equivalents on 5X4 is a rather big lens, with no iris & no shutter so a pain to use
A challenging lens by Mike Kanssen, on Flickr
FWIW is something like a 150mm/1.2 & too big to mount on a speed graphic...

 

[IpseLux]

Seeing this post late. But wanted to add, a 50mm 1:1.4 Nikkor or a Takumar with it's whispering smooth focusing are joys to use. Both with film, and with low ISO digital.
Play around with crop sizes, and they become rather versatile too. Imagine what a 75mm 1:1.4 costs? My traveling kit of two cameras, often combines a normal film format (135), with a DX sensor for this very purpose.
Normal lenses are also particularly useful with older DSLRs like the magnificent D2H. Great camera. The D2X too. But their Achilles tendon is low light performance. A fast, normal lens helps.
And in a pinch, these nifty fifties are sharp enough to allow images to be magnified a bit. A 3x or 4x is not unreasonable. Beats dragging the 80-200/2.8 D around all the time. (Although I will concede, a 135/2.8 is not as bad.)
Some manufacturers, such as Canon with their FD line, even made 2x macro converters specifically to be used with their 50mm lenses. Pretty useful, a small converter affords you both macro and a decent portrait, short telephoto to very easily handhold and photo with....

 

[wfooshee]

My first 35mm camera was a folding rangefinder my dad gave me when I was in college in the mid-70s. He'd bought it new in 1952. (He handed me the camera, a Weston light meter, and told me to shoot Kodachrome.) I shot with it for years, but it didn't take long to realize it was a lousy camera for events. Street scenes, people, even some nature scenics, it was fine, but useless at a motorsports event or an air show. I've never considered that being limited to 50mm is something to actually aspire to.

I still have that Vitessa, and it works, although I doubt the shutter speeds are entirely accurate.