When is 50mm NOT 50mm?

kev777zero wrote:

What is considered wide or telephoto may be vary between photographers, but the consensus I got from here and most sites was that on full frame, <35mm is wide, 35-50(or even up to 60)mm is considered normal, 60-80mm is no man's land (hence rarely any full frame lenses were made using such FLs), 80-135mm is portrait(aka short tele), >135mm is telephoto.

why is 50mm on full frame normal? because 50mm is a human eye's focal length (maybe that's why it is easiest to make?), but what you see will not be exactly what you shoot if you used a 50mm, since when you are using a camera the lens is going to be closer to the subject than your eyes. Hence a lens ~45mm on full frame will be more ideal.

anyways taking into NEX's crop factor you divide my numbers above with 1.5, roughly giving:

wide: <23.5mm

normal: 23.5~33.5 or up to 40mm

no man's land: 40~53.5mm

portrait/short tele: 53.5~90mm

telephoto: >90mm

(I'm not exactly sure how the no man's land FLs came about, but I guess photographers just found it awkward as in it's hard to compose street shots or portraits with it)

50mm on NEX does make it a no-man land's FL, so your traditional photographer will be loathed in using it. However it's quite close to portrait and it's easy to make hence cheaper so the average shooter tends to accept it.

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