I think the Nifty Fifty is overrated.

I don't get why people are so fond of the 50mm lens. I have never liked it. Its too wide for good portraits and too narrow to take in most scenes. I understand why as "the normal lens" it was so popular in the film days but with the improvements in optics over the last 50 years I don't think it has a place in modern digital photography. I would much rather have a shorter f/l for general photography and longer for portraits.

What do you think?

Same... 28 and 85 all the way.

As you say re: film, the original rating was for a general-purpose 35mm camera one-size-fits-all lens i.e. not carried along with a wide-angle and/or a telephoto? See Henri Cartier-Bresson articles, for example. ,,, www.l-camera-forum.com/topic/335969-why-hcb-uses-a-50mm-lens/

I've also seen "normal" interpreted as a range of focal lengths, rather than an exact 50mm.

If "normal" is related to human vision - then we're talking about quite a wide range of angles that are considered acceptable (obviously excluding peripheral vision). For myself, that is about 1 radian (58 degrees). Now considering a diagonal measure (others might prefer width or height) that angle represents a focal length of about 43mm for me.

There's a gent elsewhere who calls himself "41mm" perhaps with good personal reason!

Never cared much for the FL myself. I imagine it was the simplest and most cost effective design back in the day but I am not sure the lens makers are selling a ton of them these days.

I think that while I now prefer the 35mm (FF) FOV, and prefer an 85-100 (again FF) for portraiture, I made a lot of photographs with a 50 before I got my (first) Leica… If a nifty-fifty is the lens I have today, I can use it to make an infinite number of pictures. The quality of those images is down to me, not the focal length of the lens used. I don’t spend a lot of time naval gazing at this. For general photography — barring “specific purposes — it’s more important to pick up a camera, any camera, and lens, any lens, and go out and take photographs. The fifty is as good a choice as any, and better than some, to use while walking around with a camera.

Nowadays I find that 50mm is about right for APS-C. But back in the 1960s it seemed right for 35mm film -- I had a Pancolor then, which I foolishly sold.
If you want a 50mm, the Sigma 50mm Art lens is scarily sharp.

Don

You can say anything about anything. This can be said about any focal length. So I wonder how it is overrated, who overrated it, how.

That said, most of the time "I can't stand" 50mm, and while obtaining some prime lenses, 50mm will not be amongst them in my portfolio.
35mm is awesome, I can live with 40mm Nikon Z lens, 16-24mm will be added, 85mm on the way.
It is probably most produced prime lens historically, so in numbers it is made cheap (the nifty fifty). And so it provides some qualities for very low price that other lenses don't. We don't need to erradicate that focal length though. The "hate" is unjust (but it is still there 😂).

First-off, I don't think there's a need to develop angst over it, we all have different needs/desires with regard to sensor format, field of view, and depth-of-field, so to each their own.

That said, for full-frame (35mm film equivalent), I'm pretty much with your preferences. I like a wide-angle for the bulk of my shooting to provide a field of view that's not "normal", so to speak. But then, to the higher end I like to go really high, 200-300mm, to get the shallow DOF and "scene crop" (compression, magnification, whatever one wants to call it). If I did portraits I'd be using about 105mm because that's what I was used to using in my film days.

I agree. It was only popular because it was the widest lens that could be produced that was both cheap and fast. Wider means retrofocal.

But there's nothing remotely special about the focal length. The "same field of view as the eye" is just flat wrong. The "no distortion" is itself a distortion of the truth. I call this combination of things "the 50mm myth".

When I went through my personal favorite pictures, there was only one at or near 50mm.

I never, ever, "walk around" with a prime. I always use a zoom of some sort. It might be a 150-600, a 70-200, an 8-15 fisheye, or something in between like a wide to tele wide-range zoom, but it's never, ever a prime. Too limiting. My current most common is an 18-135 on 1.6-crop. I don't see a need for primes unless it provides something special I can't get in a zoom, like a fast aperture or a long focal length. Getting an 18-35/1.8 and a 70-200/2.8 mostly got me to get rid of my primes. I have a 50/1.8 as a gap filler (rarely used) and my telescoped (2000/7 and 2800/10).

I am interested in "just flat wrong" when so much of photography involves a range of acceptability as indeed does the "field of view of the human eye".

An analogy is when we read that diffraction "sets in" at some f/number as if there was no diffraction below that setting.

The field of view of a human eye is over 180 degrees. Vertically, we're limited by cheeks and brows. Horizontally we're limited by our noses but having two eyes gets that out of the picture.

Sharp vision is more like 1 degree.

Note that 50mm's field of view of around 40 degrees horizontally is neither one of those - total human field of view or sharp human field of view.

You may be interested in this quote from the 1937 edition of the Leica Manual by Willard D Morgan and Henry M Lester:

I get that. I do (most commonly a 43mm f/1.9 lately), but mostly for exactly the exceptions you mentioned; I prefer available light, and often at night, so speed is good. If I buy another prime it will probably be 50mm, not so much because I love that focal length, but because I can get one at f/1.2 that I can afford. Very fast fixed-aperture zooms are great but often so pricey that it's hard to justify (for me).

Went alooking for "perspectives" (pun intended) on the 50mm lens, and found this:

www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/05/how-the-50-mm-lens-became-normal/560276/

The writer didn't substantiate any of his assertions on the human field-of-view equivalence, but he did state something else interesting:

"The idea that a 50-mm best approximates human sight has more to do with the early history of lens production than any essential optical correspondence between the lens and the eye."

He also provides this interesting assertion:

"... 50-mm lenses reproduce the proportions of faces, depth, and perspective at roughly the same size as we see with our naked eyes."

I don't have a way to test this, but the notion resonates in my lens preferences, which are basically about producing renditions that are not like what we normally see. The article goes on to relate some of the history of lens design and production, which I found interesting no matter my lens predilections.

Anyway, some food for thought.

OK, I am at point where I have to say this.....would it ever be possible to get through a clearly obvious gear thread without having that one obligatory guy pointing out that its not the gear, its the photographer? Is that too much to ask, because it happens.....Every. Single Time.

You are not wrong. We all know that. Sometimes we like to talk about a piece of gear, a focal length, God forbid "exposure", without having that one holistic patron saint reminding us of what photography is. Nothing personal, it was just your turn today.

</rant>

I know about that. It's bunk. I'll tell you why.

The idea is based around that assumption. That assumption is like the average number of births per woman - 2.3. Yet no one has 2.3 children.

It's an average, and even there it's still wrong, as it's based around a small print (5x7) that isn't even the same aspect ratio of a 35mm film frame.

If you take many people and put them in front of many prints of many types and many sizes, and add in many electronic displays of many sizes, and measure where they stand naturally, you'll get a wide range of distances relative to the length of the diagonal. Maybe that average will be in the 50mm-equivalent range (probably a bit wider), but that still doesn't mean anything - like 2.3 children for determining the best number of children to have.

I like to use the term "natural" for that condition where the final image subtends the same angle of view in your vision as did the original scene to the camera. But there's nothing magical about this condition except, perhaps, in one rare (for us) circumstance - when you should shoot a circular fisheye imagery and project it onto the inside of a dome with your head near the center, so as to create the feeling of immersion in the imagery (those IMAX domes do this, and it's pretty effective). Note that's not 50mm viewed on a 5x7 print.