The Online Photographer

Do you have a favorite prime lens?

I should first say, Happy Fourth of July, fellow 'Murricuns. The Lake Road outside my window is practically a parade! Lots of people here for the Fourth. Dogs, bikes, joggers, walkers, babies in strollers. It's 70°F and partly sunny, after lots of wetness lately. But even the rain has been nice; yesterday we had the kind of rain you want to take a walk in, a "farmer's rain," warm and gentle but steady.

A "prime" as the term is nearly universally used now is merely a single-focal length lens, as opposed to a zoom. Ninety-nine-point-nine of all the lenses photography enthusiasts buy these days are either primes or zooms; all other types have become curiosities.

For a lot of the history of photography, primes were your only choice, and with a lot of my favorite camera types you were pretty much forced to use a prime lens. View cameras use almost exclusively single-focal-length lenses. Rangefinders like the classic Leica M4 and M6 not only used primes, but you were limited to a middle range of focal lengths by the magnification of the viewfinder and the framelines it provided. Many early TLRs were even more limited, having only one prime lens permanently mounted. These days, there's a new and very important type of camera that is typically restricted to either one, two, or three prime lenses: smartphone cameras. A whole new generation of photographers is learning to see with fixed focal-lengths. (Given that device cameras enable you to crop with lightning speed, a lot of this new generation are already naturally fluent at cropping, further enhancing their visualizing skills.)

There are a few traditional advantage of primes that still usually hold, namely that they tend to be smaller, faster, and cheaper than zoom lenses. But those things aren't always strictly or necessarily true. Just usually.

My favorite favorite prime*, historically. They cost about a million dollars now.

There are visualizing advantages to primes too. Somewhere in his books, Ansel Adams recommended making a cardboard cut-out with the aspect ratio of your format, and learning how far away from your eye to hold it to mimic the field of view of your lens. By closing one eye and moving this "cropping aid" around, you could essentially preview what the view camera would see without having to laboriously set up the tripod and the camera and get under the groundglass. It's an exercise that's always appealed to me but that I've never actually done—which is strange, considering that I tend to like learning exercises, especially ones that apply to seeing. Of course, most cameras these days let you preview scenes by simply holding them up to your eye and looking through them, or holding them up and looking at the viewing screen. If you use any kind of big or involved kind of camera these days, a wonderful way to "scout" situations is Adam Fowler's Viewfinder Preview app ($5.49) for the iPhone.

The reason the cardboard-cutout route might be preferable is that it gets you closer to the naked eye, and one of the best reasons to shoot with a prime lens or two is that it greatly facilitates the skill of being able to look at the world with the naked eye and know instinctively exactly how your camera is going to see it—without raising your camera to your eye at all. Anyone who's done an OC/OL/OY (one camera, one lens, one year) with a prime will know exactly what I mean. A prime teaches you how to see like your camera sees.

So do you have a favorite? For the sake of simplicity, please name only one. No lists please.

...Name only one, that is, if you have one. I suspect a lot of people won't. Strangely enough, I myself don't have a favorite prime at the moment. I wish I did! I've had various ones in the past, which I remember with great fondness. But not right now. The last one I had was the Fuji XF 23mm ƒ/1.4, but it hasn't been on my camera much in recent years.

Maybe I should work on that!

Mike

*Note boudoir-themed camera porn.

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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)

[Ed. note: Skullduggerous Ed. has added B&H links to these comments. Just keepin' the lights on, ignore the guy disguised as the janitor....]

Featured Comments from:

Bob Blakley: "This is probably the most conservative choice possible, but hey—it's what I use and what I like: the Leica Summilux-M 50mm ƒ/1.4 ASPH. It's not the lens I use most; I shoot a lot of live music events and I need an 85mm to get the field of view and framing I like for that. But the Summilux is the lens I like using most. 50mm is the field of view in which I naturally visualize, and low light is the environment in which I see images best. The Summilux is the best performer I've ever used within those parameters, and I've used it for a long time so its output rarely surprises me in a way that disappoints. And it's ergonomically perfect. Like a baseball, it's just the right size and weight for the human hand."

Mike replies: I wrote about that one once. Your review is better, because you've used it. Plus yours is shorter.

Wiley Bogren: "Pentax DA 35mm ƒ/2.8 macro  :-)  SO flexible and satisfying!!"

Mike replies: Carl and I wrote about that one too! Unfortunately most of the illustrations have vanished. I'm starting to see my life disappear....

Sharon: "Fujifim GF 110mm. It’s such a beautiful lens."

Mike Ferron: "For the time being I have bagged up the Micro 4/3 gear and dusted off the well-used Nikon D610. The default, do-everything lens bolted to the front is a 35mm AFD ƒ/2. Not only is it a very useful general purpose focal length but it is quite compact and very sharp through most of the frame. The D610 does not feel like a beast with this smallish 35mm attached."

Mike replies: I reviewed that one too, but I no longer know where.

Geoff Wittig: "I'm very fond of Sigma's 135mm ƒ/1.8 lens in Canon's EF mount. Yes, it's big and heavy, but it balances nicely on the Eos-5 mk.IV, especially with the battery grip. It's quiet and quick to focus, especially considering how much glass is moving around. Sigma's 85mm ƒ/1.4 is maybe a bit sharper, but it's pretty close, and eminently usable wide open if you want that. The drawing is very nice, and the bokeh looks great to my eyes. I find the extra working distance compared to 85mm just gives me nicer portraits, whether of people, flowers or trees."

Tom Burke: "I have four primes, clustered quite closely in focal length, but of them the only one I use with any frequency is the Canon EF-S 24mm ƒ/2.8 STM. On my Canon 90D APS-C DSLR that’s about a 38mm full frame equivalent. I do like it, though partly because it’s very small and light—it’s a pancake lens. But I must admit, I would feel very restricted if that was my only lens—even my iPhone has three. Normally, I use a standard zoom."

Kirk: "Sigma 65mm ƒ/2 i-Series Contemporary for L-mount. It's the perfect focal length for me."

Nick Reith: "The 18mm (28mm equivalent) bolted to the Ricoh GR II is, to my eye, quite sublime. Macro/closeup is equally sharp and overall rendering in this small, lightweight package never fails to deliver."

Crabby Umbo: "When it comes to my professional career, the number one 'go-to' lens for most of my sheet film work was a Goerz Red-Dot Artar 8.25 inch, although I spent most of my career with an equivalent 210mm Computar. For my Hasselblad, it was the 150mm Carl Zeiss. Not being a 35mm person, professionally, out of all the systems I cycled through, it's gotta be the 35mm ƒ/2.8 Carl Zeiss for Contax."

Jayanand Govindaraj: "On the Nikon systems it has to be the AF-S 58mm ƒ/1.4G—slightly longer than normal, but not too much, a perfect full-frame prime for me, and works well with the FTZ adapter. Of course, on a Nikon APS-C body it becomes a gentle, soft and totally perfect portrait lens. It is a real all rounder! On the Fuji system, my favourite lens is the 90mm ƒ/2, though my most used one is the 35mm ƒ/1.4. After the Nikon Z system came out, I sold all my Leica M primes, because I really could not see the differences in a print to justify keeping them over the Nikkor S equivalents."

Mike replies: I wrote about that Nikon 58mm too...here and there....

Michael Cytrynowicz: "Pentax FA 31mm. I sold my copy years ago, when I sold my K20D, and bought a new one when I bought the K3 III. In fact, I bought the K3 because I wanted to use the FA 31mm again. And it's a killer combination. My wife, who's a fierce critic, recently looked at some old Yosemite photos (on the K20D) and remarked they were 'beautiful.' I was so embarrassed (I immediately thought of Ansel and felt a deep attack of impostor's syndrome).

Jeff1000: "Without question, the Nikon Z 50mm ƒ/1.8 S, supplanting the Leica 35mm Summicron (available at the time of the M6). The Nikon Z 50mm is generally sharper edge to edge. The Leica possessed peachier bokeh though."

Kent Phelan: "35mm, anybody's 35mm. I don't know how many of them I have owned through the years, but the various iterations of 35mm Summicron top the list. I vividly remember photographing the first seconds of my first-born child's life with a Nikon F and 35mm ƒ/2 AI Nikkor lens. Today I met his 2-day-old son, my first grandchild, for the first time. This time I used a Nikon Z7 with, you guessed it, a 35mm ƒ/1.8 Nikkor-Z lens. If I could have only one lens it would be a 35mm or 35mm equivalent."

Adrian: "The 80mm normal lens on the Mamiya 7. Perfection, once I came to terms with its design compromises (slow, doesn’t focus close). I haven’t shot much film since the pandemic started, but this lens remains the reference for me. Everything else I use, I end up comparing mentally with this ultimate form of the Plasmat design would have drawn."

Steve Rosenblum: "M Rokkor 40mm f/2. Incredible lens."

Marc Lawrence-Howe: "The Fujifilm XF 35mm ƒ/1.4 R is my favourite. I think a strength* I have in photography is seeing detail or composition within the everyday that perhaps a lot of people don't see, seeing things from a literal or metaphorical different angle, divergent from 'normal.' I don't mean this as a conscious thing, more as an innate thing, a 'lucky' skill. The contrasting, significant deficiency is that I'm not at all good at previsualising photos, in particular including wider or longer focal lengths—the 'natural eye' focal length, as boring as it can seem even to me, feels like it is where I do best, and I enjoy the results more. I'm also realising technical perfection isn't really my bag, but this has been a harder thing to pull away from as my pleasure in photography is also the technological. Overall I feel like this lens lets me see what my eye sees, satisfy the technical pedantry I sometimes over-focus on, but lets me also use its optics like a broad, abstracting brush or a 'boring,' precise record of what I see. It lets me show how the world looks to me.

"I do call a lot of my photos my 'boring photos,' but I like them, and I most often like them with this lens.

"(*I am not a great photographer, placing myself just above mediocre for the photo-taking population. It is what it is; after several decades I still enjoy photography more than most anything else; it'll do.)"

Ken Bennett: "I'll throw in another vote for the Fujifilm XF 35mm ƒ/1.4 lens. I often shoot with that lens in addition to the usual two-zoom combo, or with other primes, and the photos from that lens just pop off the screen even as thumbnails."

Len Metcalf (partial comment): "I love one particular prime lens...by far my favourite all-time lens. I use it almost exclusively. It’s a nifty-fifty equivalent. Interestingly no one else has mentioned it. I love the manual aperture ring and manual focus as I can only blame myself when it’s wrong. Voigtländer 25mm ƒ/0.95 on an E-M1 Mark II for 95% of all my photographs. It’s definitely not perfect. Sharp when stopped down. Strange bokeh sometimes. Slow to use. Not weather sealed. But I love it and haven’t ever found something I like the same in a different format. So I always seem to return to Micro 4/3. I am spoiled by it, I reckon."