Most photographers would agree: a 50mm lens is a great addition to your lens collection. The 50mm focal length has always been popular, and 50mm lenses tend to be cheap, lightweight and small.

There are a couple of odd exceptions. Many lens makers use this focal length to create what are called “halo” products: large, flashy, expensive items that they don’t really expect to sell. Nikon, for example, introduced a 58mm f/0.95 “Noct,” (meaning “night”) in October 2019, with a retail price of $7999.95. Sure, this lens is exotic and can make wonderful images, but at that price, it seems doubtful any of us would ever buy one, and might not ever even see one in the field.

Those of us without private jets and yachts are left with more affordable options, and one I always recommend is one version or another of the 50mm lens. My photography students will sometimes ask me which one they should get, and my first answer is always “the one in the junk drawer.”

But if you are in a buying mood, I like a lot of the current offerings from Nikon, Canon, Sigma, Sony, and even some odd brands from the Pacific rim.

I have a number of 50mm lenses, and recently shot one of my favorite monthly events, Open Mic Night, with one of them, the AF-Nikkor 50mm f/1.8G. The results were amazing, as always, from this diminutive workhorse.

I also decided to compare this lens with another 50mm in my collection, the AF-Nikkor 50mm f/1.4G. And yes, these two lenses are very similar in name and performance.

Why did I grab the f/1.8 instead of the f/1.4? Maybe it was looking a little forlorn on my bookshelf. Maybe I wanted something a little lighter? Smaller? Less showy?

The truth is that most lenses in this class are very capable of producing the results we need, and the differences between them is fairly insignificant. Is the f/1.8 lighter and cheaper? Yes. Is the f/1.4 brighter in the viewfinder and happier to be used at those very large apertures? Yes. Could I have made these same images with any lens in this class, from the 1969 Minolta 58mm f/1.4 to the 1985 Nikkor 50mm f/1.8 “pancake” lens to the $8000 “Eye of God” lens? Sure!

I often roll my eyes when someone on a web forum or social media site says they want to “upgrade” from the f/1.8 to the f/1.4, because I know there is almost nothing the f/1.4 can do that the f/1.8 can’t. You know when you should upgrade? When the f/1.8 falls apart in your hand because you’ve made 50,000 images with it.

In the end, I am always happy when I get out and and shoot with any of my lenses in this category, and I would urge you to do the same.

My readers know that among my favorite things in the world, not just in my photography, are lenses. I like old and new, heavy and light, complex and simple, and on and on. There are almost no lenses that don’t intrigue me.

One class of lenses I find the most satisfying to work with are prime lenses, so named because they have only one (“prime”) focal length, as opposed to zoom lenses, which let you “zoom” through a range of focal lengths. There are a lot of zoom lenses in this world, since their design has matured dramatically in the last 25 years.

I like prime lenses for several reasons. They tend to have larger maximum apertures, they tend to be lighter, and they tend to have great optics.

Flash forward to today, and an interesting collision of prime lenses. First, I brought my AF-S Nikkor 35mm f/1.8 to my Ada Sunrise Rotary meeting today, where our guest speaker was beekeeper Trudy Mills.

And second, PetaPixel posted a review of Nikon’s newest prime lens, their Nikkor 35mm f/1.2S.

Okay, since both these lenses are 35mm, they should be mostly the same, right? Well, yes, and no. They are both the 35mm focal length, which is a very popular focal length. In the years before zoom lenses began dominating the profession, news and sports photographers like me had this lens, often using it as our second-camera, everything-else lens at everything from the basketball court to the courthouse. It provides a slightly wide angle of view, and shows almost no foreshortening.

But my 35mm and the new 35mm from Nikon are two very different animals. My 35mm f/1.8 is very light and small, very easy to carry, and is remarkably affordable. I think I paid less than $200 for mine.

The new 35mm f/1.2, is none of that. It is huge, heavy, and – at about $2800 – is quite surprisingly expensive.

The obvious question is: what do I get for my $2800 that I don’t get for $200. The answer might be a little disappointing: not much.

The maximum aperture of f/1.2 is a real thing with real benefits, but those benefits  are on a very thin margin, especially compared to the 35mm f/1.8, which is, of course, only one f-stop smaller than the f/1.2. Yes, if you live in the low-light concert world, or the police surveillance world, or the theater world, and constantly required the gaping f/1.2, this new lens might be on your radar.

But even I, as a news and sports photographer, can’t see a huge advantage to this big-ticket lens. I’m sure reviews will say it is “sharp, even wide open,” but so is my 35mm, and, for that matter, every 50mm lens I own.

If you want one of these are think you will use it, and have the money, sure, why not? But I’ll continue to be happy with my honey of a lens.

I sometimes miss the days of Internet past, when a search yielded an interesting web page that had links in it to other links, which might have still more links. I loved clicking around to see everything from dancing hamsters to moon landing hoaxes.

Now, I say with a heavy sign, the Internet seems to be dead. Look it up if you want: use the phrase “Dead Internet Theory.” I know it’s a “conspiracy theory,” but it makes more sense every day.

With that said, I did a few obscure web searches recently, deliberately trying to find actual, real web content, and I went down one rabbit hole after another.

As a photographer, of course I’ll click on all things photographic. One of these led me to revisit an interesting topic: ultra-large-aperture lenses, especially, in this case, the Nikkor Z 58mm f/0.95.

This lens is what’s known as a “halo” product, something that shows the prestige of the camera maker, car maker, computer maker, fine winery, distillery, etc., but is expensive enough that they actually expect to sell very few of these items.

The 58mm f/0.95 sports a list price of $7999.95. Wow. What could this lens offer that sets it so far above and out of reach? Well, upon reading some reviews and looking at some sample images, the answer is: nothing. Reviews like to point out that the optics are just about perfect, as is the build quality, and that shooting this lens at f/0.95 should result in an impressive amount of selective focus.

Two of my photographer friends and I have occasionally talked about possible renting this lens, which appears to be $363 for seven days from one prominent lens rental place.

Then, of course, the practical photographer in me took over and said, “Can I create what this halo lens can do, with the equipment I already own?” I reached into my bag of tricks and pulled out a broken, 40-year-old Nikkor 50mm f/1.4 that someone had given me, and stepped out into my front yard.

The result, as I might have expected, was every bit as usefully good as the $8000 behemoth. It’s probably not quite as technically perfect, but right out of the camera, it delivered.

So I am completely unimpressed with the idea of an $8000 50mm or 58mm lens.

I always have fun with little “what if” projects like this, and they often remind me of a term I’ve been using in the last couple of years, “Shop your closet first.”

I’ve said on more than a few occasions that I love the 50mm focal length.

There are quite a few reasons to love your 50mm, but at the top of the list is that in human scale terms, it fits just right into the efficiency quotient of manufacturing, shipping, cost, weight, and, of course, making pictures with it. For decades now, the photographic community has dubbed it the “Nifty Fifty.”

Of course, I have maybe a dozen of these gems sitting around, some in camera bags in the field, others in shelves in my home photo studio, others still on adaptors, waiting to be mounted on a mirrorless camera and experimented with.

Why, then, did I buy yet another 50mm recently? It started a couple of Christmases ago when I bought a couple of photo grab bags, one of which contained a Canon EOS Digital Rebel XT, a squirrely little camera of 2005 vintage. It worked fine, and I’ve shot a few assignments with it, all with the unimpressive but ubiquitous 18-55mm “kit” lens that equipped almost every Canon consumer digital SLR in history.

I shot a with it, then put it away, only to dig it out again and again, trying to to remember to throw it over my shoulder as a second camera at a street festival or softball game. All the while, I kept asking myself if there was any point to using this camera. Wasn’t it hopelessly outdated, with it’s three frames per second, 1600-maximum ISO, and 1.8-inch view screen on the back? Sure, but photographers (at least the creative ones) love to tinker and play with whatever gear we can find, and no camera is truly worthless until it stops working.

I looked on Ebay for Canon EF lenses that might bring new life to this camera, but they remained expensive, especially on a camera that might die in my hands the next day.

Finally, finally, on Amazon, I saw a 50mm f/1.8 from Chinese lens maker Yongnuo, marked down twice to something like $85 on Prime Day.

The result was predictable, but not in a bad way. The lens did the job the “Nifty Fifty” promised, and if the camera died, I’d probably gift the 50 to some Canon user out there who also needed to dial up there game.

So, yes, I have yet another 50mm lens, and yes, I will be making pictures with it.

Last week I talked a little about my 200mm vs my 180mm, both from a previous era of photography.

Today I’d like to take a look at my 40-year-old Nikkor 400mm f/3.5. This lens was the envy of all of us in 1985. I saw them all the time, at press events and big games like OU and OSU football.

One photographer of the era called it a “sweet piece of glass.”

When this lens was new, most photographers couldn’t afford to buy it, so most of the 400mm through 600mm lenses I saw in the field belonged to their employers, like the Dallas Morning News or the Associated Press.

Last month a much younger photographer and I were talking shop, and he kind of scoffed at the idea that I still own, and still use, older camera gear. After all, every time a new camera is announced, one of the selling points is how fast and accurate the autofocus is.

I’m willing to bet that this younger photographer has been using autofocus lenses his whole career, and manual focus is just a novelty. I could hear in his voice the doubts that he had when I told him I was still pretty good at focussing manually. And why wouldn’t I be? I spent the first 20 years of my career with manual-focus lenses.

Flash forward to last week. I was at my last baseball game of the season, Latta vs Cashion. Because of a rain delay, I arrived at Shawnee High School a little early, in time for me to make a few frames of the end of the previous game, Wister vs Preston.

I decided earlier in the day that I wanted to shoot this game with my 400mm, though I couldn’t really say why. Maybe part of it was that I didn’t need to generate dozens of images, since this was the last game of the season.

The game was tied, so I assumed it would be a while before my local team got on the field, but just as I set up, Preston hit a grounder, but Wister bobbled the ball, allowing Preston to score, winning the game.

Before my eyes and in my viewfinder, I captured celebration and dejection through my 400mm. And, it turns out, I can still focus, fast and accurately, and this lens, a relic from 1985, was still “a sweet piece of glass.”

Once in a while, when I am going through my gear and trying (usually unsuccessfully) to get better organized, I pull out one of my oldest, most prized lenses, a Nikkor 200mm f/2.0, and set it aside with the notion that I am going to insert it into my workflow in some way.

This lens is from a period in photography known for build quality, an era in which cameras were made by hand, often in Japan or Germany, and when you take a camera or lens from that era in hand, the phrase “they don’t build them like they used to” leaps to mind.

This 200mm is no exception. It is big, heavy, smooth, and quiet, and handles like a scientific instrument.

That period of photography lasted for much of the 20th century, and I have nothing but admiration for those products.

But that era was about to collide with the next: an increase in computer aided design and manufacturing, married to a period of increasing outsourcing to countries with cheaper labor around the Pacific rim, and an increased use of plastic, which saved both weight and cost.

So how does this add up? My beloved 200mm f/2.0 is an art object, but decidedly optically inferior to modern lenses.

The obvious replacement for a lens like this is a modern 70-200mm zoom, and yes, I have one. It is optically unimpeachable, sharp and fast to focus, completely reliable, but, sometimes, just a little boring. We all have one. We all make the same photos with them.

My wild card in the deck is a lens from between these two eras, the AF Nikkor 180mm f/2.8. I love this lens, both because it is super-sharp, even wide open (f/2.8), but also that it has it’s roots in the same build era as the 200mm.

Comparing them, though, is one reason I make so few pictures with the 200mm. The 180mm does pretty much everything as well as the 200mm, and the reason is a little unexpected: the 200mm isn’t very sharp when used wide open, at f/2.0. To get sharp results, I really need to stop down two-thirds of an f/stop, which is true for a lot of lenses. The 180mm, though, is absolutely great wide open. So the choice really becomes: do I shoot with the 200mm at f/2.5, or shoot with the 180mm, which is five times lighter, at f/2.8.

Everyone likes lighter cameras when we have to carry them, and I am no exception. I’ve been lugging gear from press conferences to house fires to ball games since college in 1981, and it adds up.

In conclusion, no, I am not interested in selling my giant 200mm f/2.0, but I doubt I will use it all that much. It’s a beautiful relic from the past that I can just admire and play with once in a while.

There are so many lenses for sale these days, from the $16,296.95 Nikon AF-S 800mm f/5.6 FL ED VR superlens, all the way down to a lens one of my students showed off recently, a camera body cap which holds the lens taken from a disposable film camera, on sale for $19.99.

One lens I’ve kept my eye on for nearly a year since I got ahold of a second-hand Lumix GH2 is a so-called “pancake lens,” so named due to its flatness, a Lumix 14mm f/2.5.

I have several lenses in this class, all small and lightweight, so I watched, but didn’t buy, this lens until a Black Friday sale offered it for less than $100, so I finally relented.

This 14mm fits on a Micro 4/3 camera, and is a standard wide angle.

It weighs less than two ounces. According to random Internet sources, that is the weight of a tennis ball, two slices of bread, two AA batteries, 50 jelly beans, and so on.

The lens is so small on the camera, I can’t really get my usual (and correct) left-hand-under grip, which is okay, since there is only one control, a focus ring, on the lens anyway. I tried it out, and found it was very awkward to try to manually focus it.

I threw it over my shoulder for a couple of dog walks, and the photos I made with it look pretty good. They are sharp, especially at the largest aperture, f/2.5. (For what it’s worth, almost all lenses are “sharp” at f/11, so being sharp “wide open” matters.)

I am not a collector. In fact, I honestly believe that if you don’t use something, you should think about getting rid of it. At least one friend of mine gives his older cameras and lenses to his kids and grandkids when he is done with them.

So what will be my prime focus (so to speak) while using this lens? I’d like to throw it in as a wild card, something I might carry as casually as we carry our phones, going to it when I want to be more spontaneous. I certainly have cameras and lenses that accomplish that, but all at a cost, my achy-breaky shoulders. Any time I can add capability while lightening my load, my body and my photography both win.

Like a majority of photographers, I have had various pieces of equipment pass through my hands. Many of them were great, while many of them, like the Nikon D1 or the Nikkor 43-86mm, were absolute duds.

I especially love lenses.

I had a pretty standard kit coming up on the newspaper scene in the 1980s. In fact, most of us had this setup:

Two or three cameras, for me, usually the Nikon FM2 with a motor drive, along with the following lenses:  the Nikkor 24mm f/2.0 AI-S, the Nikkor 35mm f/2.0 AI-S, the Nikkor 105mm f/1.8 AI-S, the Nikkor 180mm f/2.8 ED-IF, and the Nikkor 300mm f/2.8 ED-IF.

As the years went by, I found bargains on other lenses, like the Nikkor 400mm f/3.5 ED-IF, the Nikkor 85mm f/2.0 AI-S, the Nikkor 25-50mm f/4 AI, several 28mm and 135mm lenses, and three different 20mm lenses.

Earlier in my career, I bought a Sigma Zoom 28-80mm f/3.5-4.5, back in the day when Sigma was a very cheap (in all respects) lens. I sold it within about three months, since I never made a sharp image with it.

The most disappointing lens of this era was the Nikkor 25-50mm f/4. I had such high hopes for this rare, well-made Nikkor lens, but it was hard to focus because the focus throw (how far you need to twist the focus ring) was so long. It was okay at 25mm, but nobody loves a heavy, huge 50mm f/4 lens.

I gradually traded or all my 1980s-era Nikkor lenses for more modern lenses, mostly zooms, but I still missed some of my favorites, and recently picked another one up from a seller on Ebay, a 35mm f/2.0 of 1980’s vintage. I missed this lens after I sold it because I saw it’s potential, but didn’t take advantage of it when I had it.

The 35mm lens is sometimes regarded as a “normal” lens on 35mm-sized imaging sensors, slightly wider than the ever-present 50mm, letting photographers build a pleasing narrative without the distraction of the foreshortening that wider lenses can create.

I am also finding fewer and fewer mentions or reviews of lenses like these, and the photographic historian in me wants to remember and preserve the amazing images made by thousands of photojournalists across the globe made with lenses like these.

So, as a short review, the Nikkor 35mm f/2.0 lens is beautifully made, a pleasure to use, gives sharp, detailed images, and has pleasant selective focus with good bokeh.

So there is another lens in my bag of tricks, which goes well with my rare skill in that same bag of tricks: that I can still focus a manual-focus lens.