Of Limited Use, Part 1

These days you'd be hard-pushed to buy a new SLR (digital or otherwise) that came with a prime lens. It used to be that the good old 50mm was the standard “kit lens”; these days it's an 18–55 or 18–70 standard zoom. The general impression one gets reading around is that primes just aren't fashionable any more, that while they used to be of superior quality, modern computer-aided lens design means today's zooms are as good, or at least plenty good enough for most people.

Primes still dominate in some areas, namely macro and the big gun telephotos, but even here lenses like Nikon's 70–180mm Micro and the impressive 200–400mm VR offer the usual benefits of zooms—flexibility and convenience—while maintaining the image quality of their prime equivalents. Perhaps the last hold out of the primes is low light photography as often there just is no replacement for f/1.4. (though Olympus' fancy f/2 digital Zuikos come close). That said, the advent of cameras with perfectly usable 1600–3200 ISO has meant a good f/2.8 zoom will often suffice.

How then can the humble prime compete? First of all there's size and weight. Pentax in particular makes some superb little lenses, like the FA 35mm f/2. Put them on an *ist DS and you have a great small, lightweight picture-taking device. Better still, put a 40mm f/2.8 “pancake” lens on the DS and you have something that fits in a jacket pocket—try that with your D2x and 17-55!

It might of course be argued that the size and weight advantage of primes is negated by the need to carry a bagfull just to cover the range offered by even a basic 18–55mm zoom. However I believe this is a flawed premise for two reasons. First, the 18–55s often will have a maximum aperture of f/5.6 on the long end, and even at the wide end they are often only f/3.5. Sure, Nikon makes a nice 17–55mm f/2.8 zoom but it's huge, heavy and expensive. The second reason really depends on the type of photography you have in mind. For some types of photography the flexibility of a zoom is paramount. Press photographers for example often need to just capture events as they unfold, with little regard to artistic merit.

With a prime lens on the camera, though, your shooting style by necessity changes. Since you're limited to one particular focal length you can't just turn a ring to frame your photo, instead you need to “zoom with your feet”, moving about until the framing matches what you had in mind. And, herein lies the heart of the matter. Use one focal length, such as a 28mm “normal”, for long enough and you start to recognise at a glance what the frame will encompass. Moreover, you start to see the world in a more abstract manner: no longer do you see subjects, instead you see in terms of shape, colour, pattern and composition. When things are in motion you can anticipate the point at which they'll make a strong composition and have the camera ready in advance, without ever bringing it up to your eye. This is very helpful in street photography when you're trying to be discreet.

This takes practice of course—you need to learn a lens to make best use of it. Once you do you begin to realise that only having one focal length is not really as limiting as you'd think. Quite the opposite in fact: it can be quite liberating as you see the world in a different way, a whole range of previously unnoticed photographic opportunities presenting themselves.

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