One Thing: How a prime lens changed the way I see the world

You may be skeptical, but I like shooting with a prime lens so much that my personal camera is built around one. Photo: Richard Butler

I bought my first DSLR just a year after buying my very first digital camera, but it was the purchase of my first prime lens that really changed my photography. I’d only shot zooms up to that point, whether on film or digital, and had mistakenly thought of fixed focal-length lenses as some exclusive, specialist obscurity whose cost I couldn’t justify.

One Thing: Advice, tips and tricks from the DPReview editors About this series: Our team cuts through the noise to share the things that made the biggest impact on our work and what lessons you can bring into your own work. Read the entire series here.

Sometimes only having a single angle-of-view to work with can help you spot a photo that you might have otherwise missed. Photo: Richard Butler

The one exception I finally made, back then, was a 50mm F1.8. It had a profound impact on my photography in two ways. The first was that it completely upgraded what my camera was capable of. I’d owned lenses a little nicer than a standard 18-55mm kit zoom, but access to an F1.8 maximum aperture utterly redefined what I was able to achieve, both in terms of shallow depth-of-field and the ability to work in lower light than before.

A prime lens (35mm equiv. in this case) forces you to see a particular crop of the world, which can help you recognize when something happens in it. Photo: Richard Butler

Secondly, and more importantly, the restriction of only being able to use a single focal length forced me to think much harder about composition. It made me step back from my subject, or lie down on the floor to get a better angle, rather than simply using the zoom to re-frame a shot. After a few weeks of shooting with nothing else, I found I was viewing the world in terms of what would fit in its field of view: constantly looking for photos I could take, in a way I’d never done with zooms.

Of course, even if you are seeing the world through ’35mm equiv.’ eyes, it’s still quite possible to mis-frame your final image and cut your friends’ feet off. Photo: Richard Butler

Eventually I grew to loathe the 50mm F1.8, finding it too long for capturing my surroundings but a touch too short for the people pictures I also wanted to take. Over time my ideal kit has become a 23mm, a ≥56mm and, increasingly, a 16mm (or their equivalents on formats other than APS-C), but this preference for primes stems from one of the best £100 I’ve ever spent.

Personally I think 35mm equiv. is a great focal length for capturing the world as I encounter it, but it’s not to everyone’s tastes. Photo: Richard Butler

Do you enjoy the creative spur of working within the restrictions of a prime? If so, what’s your preferred focal length? Let us know in the comments.