Know Your Gear; The Meager 50mm Lens

Lessons from a spring photo-walk

Typical of many of my 18mm photos on this walk. Note the DOF even using f/11, used close it’s not what you imagine it to be.

We all like acquiring “new stuff”, new lenses, new cameras, new camera bags… It gives all of us a new opportunity to learn “new stuff”. We love learning new stuff, especially using new gear. We tell ourselves it will inspire us to new heights of photographic bliss. Sometimes this is true, but most of the time it’s not. I know this from decades of stupid mistakes caused by using gear ineffectively before I got to know the gear I have.

I do learn… eventually. I know the 50mm focal length. In a pinch, I can use it for almost anything with effective results. I especially know fast 50mm lenses on full-frame or 35mm cameras. In almost every circumstance I’ll pack a fast 50mm lens.

I love springtime. In our geography, the leaves on all the trees are just about to explode right now. While I am not at all anything like a landscape photographer I do like to do little photo walks in the evening. My results are usually poor but they do lead me to new places both literally and figuratively in terms of ideas. As I contemplate my first spring random photo-walk, deciding where I want to wander locally, I remember a similar endeavor way back in April 2014.

As usual, I didn’t want a photo bag. I wanted a camera and a lens to see what I could make. I took my Nikon D600 and an 18mm manual focus prime. A nice small kit that wouldn’t weigh me down. Just in case, I also threw a Nikon 50mm f/1.4 in my jacket pocket. In my head, I wanted to take some sweeping views of the early spring forest as I walked the mile or two trail to a lighthouse at the end of that trail.

That evening as the sun set, the sky was dull, the trees were still bare, and no sweeping forest vistas were to be found. I won’t bore you with all of the attempts at using the 18mm that evening but note that including any portion of the sky or bare trees was out of the question so I made images attempting to convey the mood and anything of interest like the shape of the path through the forest.

As I continued to walk, I realized it would be far easier to just use the 50mm. I know that lens so much better. I know how to make scenes look wide, I know how to make them look compressed. The large aperture might give me opportunities to abstract portions of the environment that don’t exist with the 18mm. I swapped lenses and continued on my way.

Typical compositions with 50mm, first at f/11, second at f/1.4

While that evening was not rich with typical photographic opportunities it did make me look at the world in a very different way. It forced me to work with atypical compositions. It also forced me to take properties of a lens that I am extremely familiar with and use them in new ways with subjects I am not at all comfortable with. Doing so gave me new project ideas. It even gave me new ideas for deploying super-wide angle lenses and where they would produce epic results. More on that another day.

Moving into blue-hour shooting with daylight WB large aperture lenses present abundant abstraction opportunities.

It’s springtime, get out there, take that lens or camera you don’t know very well but also pack something you know very well. You’ll learn new things about both! It’s okay to make so-so pictures as long as they are with intent. I promise they’ll lead you to new places. I especially encourage you to do your best to make lemonade from lemons. Don’t put your camera away because the pictures you wanted or expected don’t materialize.