I am Siddharthan Raman, a passionate people & street photographer. My perception towards photography has always been that a good photograph is a good surprise. I love to shoot the theme of humanity, ideas of happiness, variety of emotions mixed well with unique and sublime moments.
In this article, I am about the discuss some of the incredible rewards a photographer can reap for having a 50mm lens in his gear bag. Its a very well known fact that 50mm is made to produce such great imagery with high optical quality for its built quality is such. Let us discuss more about the advantages a photographer like me thoroughly enjoys by playing with this delicious focal length at its widest aperture f/1.4.
Reason to move closer
Despite having a Zoom lens, I hardly use it since I started realizing to the fact that focal length’s above 100 were kind of making me lazier. Tying me down just by rotating the zoom rings, and the results weren’t worthier either. I wanted to stay focussed and alive when on streets or any interesting area, move closer to the subjects, listen to their stories, show them my face before taking a portrait or any such. 50mm plays an incredible role in assisting any photographer in such case, it had helped me to throw away my relative shyness to strangers and had immensely helped me to get better in this form of art from where I originally started.
Time to compose perfectly
I can’t react to highly candid moments, this is an interesting aspect I believe. This may be either because of my camera’s low fps rate or my slow reaction time where I love to admire the scene before I press the shutter or vice-versa. 50mm will play a pivotal role here I strongly believe, when you are not in a great hurry to lose the moment and blindly believe the decisive moment is yet to happen in front of your eyes, as a photographer you have millions of seconds inside the same frame of mind surrounding the same admirable atmosphere. I get attracted to a scene, play the waiting game and then leave the rest to my instincts.
Optical Quality
When I first bought this lens and tested few portraits, I was literally blown away by the optical quality. There were instances where I didn’t know what more to process just looking at the contrast it was able to produce. Less chromatic aberration, very low distortion rate and not an unlikely vignetting. This was all new to me because all I have used before was my kit lens and a zoom lens. Bokeh is something I want to highlight here, creamy and super soft is one thing which would make you long for this lens.
Admirable in Low-Light
Its widest aperture at 1.4 is something very magnificent and due to this it tends to allow more light into the sensor thereby helping me hand in hand to do more low light photography. With better camera bodies & with today’s innovative higher ISO’s, 50mm will serve you enough under extremely critical low light conditions and would give you astonishing results. It might get you few days to come closer in getting the focus right but when you hit it right, you know the results.
Personal Love
Apart from being a workhorse, 50mm has helped me carry less gear, walk around more closer to the scenes, less chances of lens changing, picture perfect in terms of sharpness, dof, and what more. More reasons to love than to give you one bad instance. To any beginner or any aspirant in this genre of photography, I would strongly recommend a 50mm lens right there on your day of camera purchase.
Top 50mm Lenses
Here we have listed out some of the grand iconic 50mm lenses from various brands. Go ahead and enjoy the sublime beauty of 50mm with your magical photography.
- Canon EF 50mm f/1.8
- Canon EF 50mm f/1.4 USM
- Nikon 50mm f/1.8
- Nikon AF-S 50mm f/1.4
- Canon EF 50mm f/1.2 L USM
- Sigma 50mm f/1.4 EX
- Pentax DA 50mm f1.8
- SMC Pentax FA 50mm f/1.4
- Sony 50mm f/1.8
- Zeiss ZE Planar T* 50mm F/1.4
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Copyrights:
All the pictures in this post are copyrighted Siddharathan Raman. Their reproduction, even in part, is forbidden without the explicit approval of the rightful owners.
