Comment by weinzierl
1 day ago
The biggest award is that your images will look differently from nearly everything that is posted today, especially if you get close.
The past decades have been decades of wide angle. Before the turn of the millennium wide angle photography was confined to mostly landscape, architecture and real estate. Often out of necessity and not because people liked the look.
It was in the early 90s that skater subculture chose wide angle out of necessity, but they also embraced the distorted look. From there it went into hiphop culture and became mainstream.
At the same time technological development also facilitated wide angle lenses because together with tiny sensors they can be easily fitted into mobile phones and action cams.
If people 100 years from now will look at our photos and watch our videos the wide angle look will be the dead giveaway of our era.
Many, many famous photojournalists and artists embraced wide angle decades before skater culture did.
A significant number of the most famous photos from the mid century were taken on 35mm or wider lenses.
A big thing to consider is that good and practical extreme wide angle lenses didn’t exist until the 80s and 90s. Something like a 16mm f2.8 lens went from not existing to being in every pro photographers arsenal in the 1990s and 2000s
35mm photos might have been “wide” historically but it’s not very wide. Even the main camera on iPhones are around 28mm.
Skate videos created an explosion of very wide content at ~10-14mm.
> Many, many famous photojournalists and artists embraced wide angle decades before skater culture did.
Photography threads are interesting because they arrive with so many different interpretations of history. There are multiple comments claiming that “everyone” did one thing until a certain famous photographer or specific subculture came along and disrupted the world.
Yet like you said, the only real driver was the affordability and availability of equipment. When it became attained, people started using it.
That is true. A lot of journalism and street photography is 35 mm and that was considered wide by then. The difference is that distortions were seen as an error back then. Wider angles were, as you said, not widely available but I think also not much desired. This changed in the 90s when some embraced the distorted look and made it part of our photographic vocabulary.
Can’t overlook the influence of phone photography, which is usually wider (~26mm equivalent) than what was considered standard in the 90s (~35mm). These days even a 50mm will make your pictures stand out.
Particularly if it this kind of of 50mm
https://findingrange.com/2022/01/14/7artisans-photoelectric-...
I had a long streak where I packed a DSLR with a 50mm everywhere I went and never took any pictures with it because I felt depressed. Switching to zoom lenses (particularly developing a protocol to get a distinct style of landscape protocols out of my kit lens) and getting into sports photography got me out of my funk, also that 7Artisan 50mm is so much more fun than any of the other 50's in my collection. Part of it is the challenge of manual focus, the other part is the extreme wide aperture which can take dreamy looking photos that are entirely different from what people have seen before.
The image circle of this is APS-C sized => 1.5x crop factor => 75mm "full frame" equivalent.
I'd categorize this as more of a portrait lens (than "normal" as the 50mm moniker implies).
The problem with this is that without AF, you are very restricted to shooting still objects with the aperture wide open.
I too fell for the dreamy look but as i've gotten older the further away from reality a picture is, the more my gut rejects it. At this point Ive seen so many high quality (either at shooting time or post processed) pictures of SF that going around the city actually visiting those places and seeing them with your eyes feels like a massive letdown
Another good rule of thumb to remember is that a 50mm lens on a 35mm sensor ("full-frame") is roughly the equivalent FOV of the human eye, i.e., what you see naturally.
I never understood that argument. By pure FOV the human eye is much wider. Of course it is not that simple, spacial resolution drops off to sides (while temporal resolution increases). This makes statements like "50 mm on 35 mm is FOV of human eye" not very meaningful.
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Love that you mentioned the skateboarding history of it. I have fond memories of our young crew finally acquiring a “death lens” for our VX1000. It was such a fun challenge to see how close you could get because it looked so sick.
Of course that meant we ended up with a bunch of scratches over the years on the lens, and I had my fair share of hitting the lens :)