The ‘nifty-fifty’ - that ubiquitous ‘standard’ lens - comes from the days when 50mm became the ‘normal’ lens for 35mm film cameras. Normal meant equivalent to the diagonal of the film format so, strictly speaking it should not have been 50 at all, but more like 43mm. Almost all manufacturers though produced 50mm lenses and marketed them as ‘standard’ lenses, with only the occasional 45mm popping up,
50mm has a lot going for it. A simple optical formula and high sales volumes meant these were easy and cheap to produce and usually (but not always) achieved spectacular image quality and fast maximum apertures. This started in a time before zoom lenses that were both affordable and of decent quality existed, and hence the ‘nifty-fifty’s were knocked out in tremendous volume.
This meant, and sometimes still means, that very often the basic 50mm f/1.8 or f/2.0 was/is the cheapest lens in a manufacturers range, yet offers outstanding image quality. Today you can find ‘kit’ zoom lenses for less than the price of a 50mm, but there is no comparison in terms of quality or speed.
You can also find more exotic and expensive f/1.2 and f/1.4 versions, and over the years I have owned a few of these, including a Nikkor 50mm f/1.2 AiS (gorgeous) and later a 58mm f/1.4G (expensive). But today, I don’t own one at all. Although I do have one zoom that covers that range, I find I am most often using that at 24 or 80mm for most of the work that I do.
So why is that? Well, the ‘standard’ focal length is said (arguably) to cover approximately the same field of view as human vision. In other words, when I take an image at this focal length, or thereabouts, the camera records the scene pretty much as a person would if they stood at that same point. Now, I think this works great for some types of imagery, for example street, reportage and documentary work. Here, the photographer is very often seeking to record a scene with people interacting, either with each other or objects such as tools or machinery. We actually want to put the viewer in the position to view the scene as they would as if they were physically there.
The narrative in these types of images comes from the subjects’ facial expressions and the objects around them. All this tells the story, by, for example, making us smile, frown or wonder what is happening, what just happened, or what happened next. It actually helps that we are literally recording a moment in time as a bystander might have witnessed it. Deviating away from that ‘normal’ view of the world can actually become a distraction.
But, for me, when I am shooting a landscape, I am not aiming just to record what is there, I am not trying to reproduce the scene. Instead, I aim to interpret the scene in my own way, and present it to the viewer based on what I feel at the time. So, I want to be able to create compositions that emphasise some elements and de-emphasise others, that demonstrate scale, that connect the foreground to the middle to the far, that add drama, or a sense of calm. I don’t necessarily, and only rarely, want to create a record of what anyone standing in that same spot would see.
So good-bye, nifty-fifty.