Don't Neglect the "50"

This digger is a subject that I spent a fair amount of time with. It was full of so many dramatic lines and textures and pleasing shapes. Because of the scale and weight of it, this digger presented a fantastic opportunity to use the wide angle lens. I enjoyed the opportunity and got some wide shots I am really happy with. However, some of the shots I got that really give me lasting pleasure are the few I took with my 50mm "standard" lens. I attribute this to a few things.

First of all is that the Nikkor 50mm f1.4 lens is a truly fine piece of glass. It's image quality is very high and its distortion is low. It also has a pleasing out-of-focus rendition (bokeh). But all of this probably matters less than you might think. I think its main advantage is actually simply that it is a so-called "standard" lens.

Standard lenses are not sexy. They don't distort our normal perspective and so they can seem quite "boring". But they do have a unique ability to act as a sort of window into the scene. Because the perspective is undistorted things can seem that little bit more life-like. And the photographer is forced to really create the interest in the scene with colour and composition.