Fall In Love With Your 50 All Over Again

Normal lenses are great for travel and low light indoor photography

The poor “normal” lens. It sees so little use these days. If you’re like me, a 50mm normal lens was the first lens you had when you bought your first camera. It’s the piece of glass that helped you fall in love with photography and it’s been with you since the beginning.

However, the romance has faded and now you’ve moved on. You’re attracted to the bigger, longer and wider lenses, drawn to the powerful zooming capabilities of telephotos and the extreme viewing range of the wide angles. Your poor 50mm sits unused in your bag. Maybe you don’t even take it with you anymore.

So what happened? Let’s take a brief look at normal lenses and find out.

Normal lenses are called as such because they show a view that is similar to the angle and perspective of human vision. They show a view that matches what we are generally used to seeing, with little distortion or magnification. Before cameras came packaged with zoom lenses, normal lenses were often the most commonly used lenses for beginning photographers.

These days, many cameras come with a zoom lens that includes the normal range, which generally falls between 35mm-70mm, but buying a simple inexpensive fast normal lens, such as the 50mm f1.8, can be a worthwhile investment for any photographer. They are compact and extremely useful in low light situations, and they’re great lenses for travel photography.

In the past, I too went through periods of time when I didn’t use my normal lens very often because it didn’t look ‘stylish’ enough, but over the years, I have grown to love my 50mm lens because of it’s speed and it’s simple, straightforward view. I’ll use the 50mm when I want to show what’s right in front of my eyes and I don’t want the image to have the look of a wide angle or the compressed perspective of a telephoto. Its characteristics make it a great travel lens because it works well inside and out and it can be a very appealing lens for simple people shots.

I shot one of my all time favorite images of the laughing lama with my 50mm, and it has proved to be an invaluable lens in lower light situations, such as inside the Nunez de Prado olive oil factory in Baena, Spain, as pictured above.

Up close, normal lenses have a shallow depth of field, which makes them great for situations where you want to isolate your subjects and you find yourself too close to use your telephoto. However, at greater distances, I have found that normal lenses begin to lose their effectiveness. When shooting subjects at infinity, subjects tend to lose their power. Experiment with your distances, though, as your creativity may find situations to contradict this notion.

It’s time to rekindle that romance. Pull that 50mm lens out of your bag and fall in love with “normal” once again.

Tagged as: creative inspiration, Lenses, Photography, photography tips, Portraits, street photography, travel photography