When I was 25 I worked for a short time at a newspaper in Ottawa, Illinois called The Daily Times. It has since merged with a neighboring newspaper and become simply The Times. In my short time there, I shot well, in part because I was partnered with another young photographer named Harold Krewer.

Harold was friendlier than I was in those days, and more outgoing. In years since then, however, particularly after getting married, I am about as outgoing and friendly as anyone I know.

Harold and I loved to shoot news and sports. To add spice to our daily routine of grip-and-grins and rubber chicken luncheons, Harold and I would challenge each other to, for lack of a better term, shoot-outs. We would set out in opposite directions and meet back at the office in an hour with what each of us hoped would be the better image. We both shot well when we did this, and it kept us sharp.

One thing that became more and more apparent as this activity went on was that while I probably had an edge with telephoto lenses, particularly my 180mm, Harold established himself as “the undisputed king of the wide angle.” I can’t recall with total certainty, but I think his go-to lens was the Nikkor 24mm f/2.8, a staple in many photojournalists bags of the era. He made that lens sing. The angles and compositions he got with it were aesthetically and geometrically amazing.

Like all photojournalists, I use wide angle lenses all the time. My bread-and-butter lens on the job in the last few years has been the excellent Tokina 12-24mm f/4, which is a lens designed for 15x24mm image sensors, so its analog in the film era would be roughly 18-36mm. I’m good with it. I am not, however, the wide angle artist that Harold was.

I talked to Harold on the phone recently. He left journalism some years ago to pursue a career in his first real love, railroads. It was good to talk to him, and particularly neat that he remembered, word for word, the phrase, “undisputed king of the wide angle.”

During the heyday of 35mm photographic film, single lens reflex (SLR) camera bodies were very often sold with a “normal” lens on them, a 50mm. There were several reasons for this; the 50mm was small enough that it fit into most photographer’s hands easily, it was cheap to manufacture, it was lightweight, it usually sported a fast (meaning large) maximum aperture, and, most significantly, its angle of view on a 35mm film SLR approximated the perspective of human vision. When you looked though a 50mm lens mounted on a camera, you saw a bright, clear image that was akin to what your eye saw.

Enter the digital SLR camera. Unlike the ubiquitous 35mm film camera, digital cameras continue to be sold with several sizes of sensors, and as a result, the 50mm is a normal lens on some cameras, but a short telephoto on others. On some early digitals like the Kodak DCS315, a 50mm lens gave the field of view of a 130mm on a film camera. Most of the digital SLRs in the field today have sensors of the so-called APS-C size, which is about 24mm x 15mm, or approximately 1.5 times smaller than a 35mm film frame. As a result, the 50mm gives a field of view equivalent to about what a 75mm lens gave on a film SLR.

That left the photographic world with a gap. What was the new normal lens? As it turned out, advances in computer aided manufacturing allowed lens makers to build small, cheap zoom lenses to sell with their new digital SLRs. These became known as “kit lenses,” since they were sold with a DSLR as a kit. These zooms, typically 18-55mm focal length, filled in for the normal lens on the APS-C sized sensor, which, if you do the math, is about 33mm.

What is decidedly lacking in the kit zoom is a large maximum aperture. Why does this matter? Large maximum apertures give a nice, bright viewfinder images, allow us to shoot in low-light situations, and can give us shallow depth of field to isolate our subjects. To this end, last year before Abby’s family reunion, I bought her an AF-Nikkor 35mm f/1.8 DX, since I knew there would be many low-light situations coming up for which her superzoom would be too dark. It turns out that this is one of Nikon’s gems, and everything we shoot with it is solid gold. Abby misses the ability to zoom, but at a wedding we worked Saturday night, she did a great job of “zooming with her feet,” and she made many great images with the 35mm f/1.8.

As I started to pen this piece, I prowled around the house and the pasture for a few minutes to come up with a few new examples, and once again had no difficulty at all making some rather nice images. The examples I shot today were made at f/2 or f/2.8, since that is exactly the point of having such a lens.

Finally, the price is right. I think we paid $199. I highly recommend it.