My portrait lens says your kit zoom is lame and needs to go away
Today, practically all cameras come with a zoom lens; and photographers just take it for granted that you kinda smoosh the zoom ring back and forth until something looks sorta okay to you.
I think that’s regrettable for a couple different reasons. True, after a rocky start today’s zooms have evolved to be pretty decent in terms sharpness and compactness. But compared to single-focal-length lenses, you still pay a penalty of a couple of f-stops in maximum aperture. Furthermore, I think it gives a photographer a certain mental clarity having to make a deliberate choice between a limited handful of primes: “am I trying to do THIS, or THIS?”
As I wrote earlier, SLRs up through the 1980s typically came with a 50mm standard lens. From there, most photo hobbyists took the path of least resistance and bought one of the era’s cheap, ubiquitous 28mm wide-angles; plus either a 135mm telephoto or a chunky 70-200 zoom.
Well, in those days people also bought lots of station wagons with wood-grain-vinyl trim panels. That doesn’t mean it was a good idea.
Let’s forget “what everybody did,” and start over by asking what focal lengths are actually useful? And I’d argue the typical 50, 28, 135 combo is actually a poor choice in many ways.
Projects and ponderings for photographers who shoot film