The Lens

Visualizing With Primes

A trap with zoom lenses is that you can become an easy slave to their versatility. Instead of clearly visualizing a picture before looking through the camera, you make the lens show you a bunch of possible pictures that you pick from. Multiple choice photography. Chances are good that without a concrete idea of what you’re after, you’ll end up picking the safe and familiar answer. That’s just the way our brains work. They’re wired for recognition.

With a fixed focal length lens, you end up shooting things in a lot of non-standard ways out of necessity. You make do. “Damn,” you think. “I wish I had a zoom or a longer focal length. Oh well, I’ll take it anyway.” believing it to be a failure. When you finally see the picture you made though, you may discover something in it you like; even that it succeeds in ways you never would have guessed at. Surprise. A connection is made and voila: you’ve just learned to see a little better.

After about six months of using only a 35mm lens, I was seeing that cropped frame in my minds eye and could visualize pictures with greater clarity. Less and less I found myself walking forward or back with my camera at my eye (and yes, I did bump into stuff more than once). Now I can get to about where I need to be (safely), raise the camera to my eye, take the picture, and I’m done. I’m no longer “surprised” or taken off guard by what I see through the viewfinder.

That’s the 0.58 viewfinder with the 35mm frameline on my M (as seen by my iPhone). I’ve looked through this little window enough now to have it pretty much tattooed on my brain. So as I look around my environment with an intent to photograph, camera at my side, this is basically what I see, rather like a cybernetic HUD. Rangefinders with their static viewfinders and variable framelines are well suited to teaching your brain to see in fixed focal lengths.

One Lens

Although there’s an awful lot you can do with the 35mm focal length, there’s also a lot you can’t do. And I’m not just talking about obvious telephoto subjects like birds, wild pigs, or Sean Penn. I’m talking stuff like landscapes, architecture, and people.

I found myself often frustrated at having to tilt the camera up or down to get the picture I wanted, particularly for subjects like houses. Just back up? Well, first thing is… you often can’t—especially in urban enviornments (e.g., car is in the way, busy street, something else gets in your frame that you don’t want there). Second thing is that changing your position changes the spatial relationships. Often this doesn’t matter, but sometimes it matters a great deal. Tilting is a problem because it distorts. Without a wider lens, or a camera with movements, there’s not much you can do about it. And finally, a fuzzier—but related—point was that I found it harder to capture the presence of a scene. There just wasn’t the sense of space like there is with wider lenses. I probably missed that most of all.

On the other end, I also longed for the 50mm I’d used on my Nikon SLR last summer. It focused close. It was fast and could do nice tight portraits. It taught me things about composition that the 35 didn’t. In general, I much preferred the 50 for people.

If I had to pick just one lens (and it couldn’t be a zoom) to use for everything, I’m pretty sure it would be a 35. It’s flexible and capable and probably the best “does most things” focal length in my opinion.

Yeah, I could live with it. But I’m glad I don’t have to.