Thoughts on focal lengths

I finally got my hands on an ultrawide zoom lens to round out my focal length access. For the longest time, the widest I could go was 24mm, which feels awkwardly too wide for a “normal” focal length but too narrow for a true “wide” focal length. Picking up a 10-18mm was refreshing to finally get really wide focal lengths. With that in mind, I had the idea to jot down my current thoughts on all the focal lengths I’ve been using.

10mm #

10mm is honestly just an insane focal length overall. So much falls within the frame that my own shadow becomes a concern. It’s no fisheye, but it’s probably the widest one could go without getting into fisheye territory. All this to say: it’s incredibly dynamic, it’s fun, I have no clue what I’m doing with this one. I’ll need more practice on wide angles, especially this one, but it’s super fun to get close to an object and watch it stretch out.

18mm #

Part of including this is that it’s the maximum zoom of that ultrawide zoom lens, so I naturally land on it all the time. It also doesn’t feel nearly as insane as 10mm and doesn’t exhibit perspective distortion the way 10mm does. However, it’s still plenty wide enough to feel like a proper wide angle, so it’s great for snapshots (incidentally, this FOV is very similar to modern phone cameras’ FOV).

The nice part about all this is that I don’t feel a need to focus on picking a subject with it to build a story. With narrower focal lengths, I’m thinking about where I want the composition to focus, but with 18mm and wider, I’m just putting a scene in frame. I may seek out more subject-driven compositions as I get more used to ultrawide focal lengths, but for now, it’s a great easy default and reaffirmed my decision to pick up an ultrawide zoom lens.

24mm #

This was actually the first prime lens I bought: the EF-S 24mm f/2.8. It’s still one of the smallest lenses I own when adapted, and thus best for street photography. And street photography it’s definitely great at, but weirdly it’s a challenging focal length: unlike 35mm or 50mm, 24mm doesn’t highlight a subject. I’m usually three or more meters from my photo’s subject, and for any one thing to hit that crucial size threshold where it becomes the subject, 24mm seems to prefer a subject around 1-2 meters away. I’m left using other compositional tools to pick a subject, which is more challenging and rife with failure.

The flipside is that 24mm is of course much wider than 35mm. Point the 24mm at a building and it captures the shape and effect of said building fantastically. It’s also great at capturing streetscapes, because it includes a lot of surrounding context to contextualize whatever I’m photographing. So when not aiming to focus people in the picture, the 24mm is great. I can get close to an inaminate subject just fine. But if my goal is to focus a person, I’m not using the 24mm. I’m not willing to get that close and potentially invade people’s personal space.

35mm #

This is easily my favorite focal length. Much of that is thanks to the associated lens, the RF 35mm f/1.8, which is stabilized, fast, incredibly sharp, and has surprisingly good macro capabilities. With that lens, I’m able to go out at night and get well-exposed pictures without too much trouble (although I wish I didn’t need to set the camera to M to set shutter speed low enough to use the lens’ IS).

The actual focal length, being just a bit tighter than the ’nifty fifty’ FOV, is great. Mentally, it’s like seeing the scene about three meters away and emphasizing the subject just a bit - I feel like the FOV lends itself to having a central subject with surrounding context. It’s a focal length that’s great at creating stories, since all stories need a subject. If there’s any drawback to this length, it sucks for architecture - it’s just too tight to fit a building in, but too wide to focus a detail.

50mm #

This would be a classic portrait length, especially with an f/1.8 aperture. But I don’t do portraits. So this ends up being a tricky lens to take with me. 50mm is just enough reach to stop me from using it to document my general surroundings, like what I use the 35mm and 24mm for. However, it’s not enough to snipe a small or distant subject like the 55-250.

What the 50mm seems to do, in my experience, is nudge abstract compositions. There’s not enough space to photograph a scene; instead, I have to pick a subject and frame it up. Thus the overall effect, devoid of almost all context, feels minimalist, at times abstract. Using the 50mm for street photography is analogous to bringing a telephoto zoom to landscape photography - it’s a style reminiscent of poster design that looks fantastic if done right. It’s of course more challenging, since now without contextual details, I need to use an almost painterly eye for composition to make the photo visually appealing. Blocks of color, patterns, framing lines; perspective is no longer on my side.

55-250mm #

This lens has been my main birding lens. It’s more a tool than a style; if I need to take a picture of something far away, I pull it out. This makes it surprisingly useful for landscape photography because it can pick out smaller vistas on the horizon fantastically. The dim aperture is a struggle, but lens IS does help - unfortunately, I couldn’t get my monopod to be as useful.