Recently something annoying happened, I started thinking about trying a 28mm lens again. This is a focal length I hate with a passion, but after accidentally attaching a wide angle to my Hasselblad I was impressed with the results. That god damned Leica M3 I love so much is not designed for a 28mm lens, it being a 50,90,135mm tuned camera. I briefly considered another Leica, maybe an M6 but then noticed Trump had crashed global economy. Now’s a good time to rekindle the love affair with my Nikon FM2. Considering a mint 28mm f2.8 AIS can be had for a couple hundred quid; it seemed a good call.
While my 50mm has started to become very intuitive, I find myself constantly finding images where its cropped too much out of the scene I wanted. I find the 50 has a very slight magnification over my eyesight. A 30/35mm lens might have been the sweet spot, but I wanted to try 28mm for the very slight drama it could add via its acceptable distortion level. I love the idea of sticking to one lens but one more lens is hardly going to kill the intuition I have developed with the 50mm. I have been carrying the Leica with a 50mm and the Nikon with a 28mm in my bag, but I am finding my brain starts adapting to seeing images with one or the other but not both focal lengths.
There is a big difference between the two lenses. I’m still finding my opinions on the 28mm. All I have read about normal lenses is confusing rather than wrong. 50mm is always said to be the most natural lens, it is what your eyes see. 50mm is like the little scene you notice on your walks, It is equivalent to the zone your eyes focus on. But it’s like getting a piece of paper with a little rectangle cut out of it and pressing it close to your face cropping most of your periphery vision out. That’s the bit of information everybody is leaving out.
28mm on the other hand sees just a fraction more than my half decent periphery vision, not the extremes of my periphery vision, the stuff I can comfortably see to an acceptable level without pulling a funny face and squinting. I find 28mm like my normal vision as well, just in a different understanding.
For a lot of situations it is useless, esp. when I want my subject in the middle distance with some picturesque elements in the foreground, a common composing technique. The result is the elements in the foreground dominate while the subject feels miles away. For grand vista style landscapes, it opens everything up too much, throws everything into the distance making it look like the universal holiday snap, where the tourist coach parks on top of the mountain, everybody gets off to take that photo. As photography is the Art of Cropping to some degree, the wider the view, the more complex the amount of shit you must balance in the frame becomes.
Where 28 mm does work is capturing the scene your inside. When you are in the landscape and want to capture the scene/experience your standing in. When you are standing Infront of the stile that leads off into a beautiful meadow and you want to capture where you stand and what you experience. It also has a huge advantage in having a greater DOF than the 50mm. The more I get into printing the more I dislike out of focus blur.
