Occasionally I am asked what kind of equipment I shoot with or what has helped me to develop my eye for an image. First and foremost, I’m always advocating that the most valuable piece of equipment you will ever own as a photographer is the six inches of real estate in between your ears. Without a creative concept, the drive to be better and the attention to notice everything in the frame, no lens or body will ever make you the photographer you could be.
That being said, I do think there are certain lenses that can help develop an eye. I shoot exclusively with prime lenses – that’s fixed focal length lenses such as the 35mm and 50mm. These light, compact and super fast lenses have without question improved my photography. That’s because they’ve force me to use another piece of equipment most photographers tend to overlook – their feet. Without the ability to zoom, if I want to crop in closer or get extra environment in my photos, I’m forced to move to do it.
While moving back and forth I’ll often move into a frame or perspective I might have otherwise overlooked if all I had to do was zoom to get the crop I was looking for. I’ve found that’s a mistake a lot of photographers make. If they don’t immediately like what’s in front of them, they zoom in or out until they find a frame that’s agreeable, while completely overlooking the fact that if they moved a foot to the right or left they’d create a far more interesting angle. By being forced to move I have to carefully think about how I want to frame every image or sequence of images.
Don’t get me wrong, zoom lenses certainly have their uses, especially within dynamic environments like sports, wedding and event photography. Often times you simply don’t have the option to back up another foot to get the group of four smiling brides’ maids into the frame. But when you have full control over a commercial, editorial or lifestyle session, I believe prime lenses are the way to go.
Added benefits of the prime lenses are their size. Small and light they are easy to carry around for hours and are very unobtrusive. They’re fast focusing for action sequences with the capability to open up to very shallow depths of field for selective focal points. What focal length you choose depends how compressed you want your image. Wide angle lenses like the 35mm are great for lifestyle action, while the 85mm is an ideal portrait lens.
Whether you’re a beginner looking to find new perspectives or a veteran stuck in the same boring angles and crops every session, I highly recommend going out and picking up a prime lens. They’re an affordable way to reinvigorate your photographic eye – or take it to the next level.
I agree with you. I don’t claim to use prime lenses exclusively, but I do love using my 28mm, 50mm, and 100mm lenses. It’s always a good reminder, though, to consider a prime when shopping for a new lens, especially because the lenses being advertised the most are often the zooms. Still on my wish list are a 16mm, a better 50mm, an 85mm, and a 200mm.
One thing you might want to mention in your recommendations is that the effect of the focal length of the lens depends on the crop factor of the sensor. A 35mm lens on a full-frame sensor is wide angle, but the same lens on a 1.6 crop factor (APS-C) sensor is just a bit on the telephoto side of normal.
Nice Article, I love my primes for forcing me to stop and think about my images before I get the camera out of the bag…. and I’m going to add other main reason I like my primes:
Sharpness, color, and contrast. Yes, a good prime is capable of better image quality than even the best zooms. Less glass and less engineering compromise equals better image quality. I’ve tested some well regarded zooms against my primes and haven’t found a zoom that compares across the board.
Beyond that fact, with a zoom, the lens hood is designed to work at the widest zoom level without vignetting — so when you are zoomed in a bit, it’s likely that you will have a light source out of frame but still shining on the glass — this decreases image quality by causing flare, loss of sharpness, contrast, and color saturation. Yes, you can manually shade your lens, but you won’t do it every time and end up with some quality issues…
Also, since I normally shoot with manual focus – the brighter the image, the better. My f/2 and faster lenses rock!
But back to the “stop and think” — it seems that a lot of modern photographers see a scene and zoom in to catch it… that type of image creation has never even occurred to me. When I see or create a scene, walk around the area to find the best framing, and then decide what equipment I need to create my image… I guess I’m glad I’m a prime lens photographer.
Great, I did not heard about this topic up to now. Cheers!!