The Sweet Spot

Alastair Norcross wrote:

R2D2 wrote:

dan the man p wrote:

As others have expressed, if you're going to go lightweight with the M, primes are the way to go. I recently got the Sigma 30 mm f/1.4 and found it perfect for 90% of what I do, which is taking pictures of family, friends, pets, etc. It's a natural focal length that is perfect for pictures of people, unlike the 22 mm, which is too wide for portraits. It's still small enough that I can take it pretty much everywhere, either around my neck or clipped to my belt. It now stays on my camera almost all the time. And at f/1.4, the low light capability and shallow DOF are far beyond anything you'll find in a compact camera. For me, this is well worth the lack of zoom. Of course, I'll still switch lenses when the situation calls for it, like if I need wide angle or telephoto.

It's amazing how versatile that focal length (range) is. Sometimes I think that I could survive with the (Canon 32) alone!

For many of us learning photography back in the SLR days (manual focus in my case),

LOL, don’t remind me how old I am!  I started out with my dad’s Canon rangefinder long before graduating to an SLR.

the camera came with a 50-55 fast prime as standard,

Yep, a good old 50mm Nikkor!  Had one for years!

and that's what we shot with most of the time.

I even shot a buddy’s wedding with one…

Zooms were pretty exotic back in the 70's, and most weren't very good.

…with a Nikkor 80-200 on a 2nd body (I was lucky   ).

I shot with an SLR and standard prime (first an F2 58mm on a Zenith, then an F1.8 50mm on a Mamiya) for a couple of years

Same path here.  Graduated to medium format and 4x5 large format eventually.

before supplementing it with a telephoto (200) and wide angle (28). It wasn't until the early 80's that I got my first zoom (a Tamron 28-50 for Canon FD mount).

Sold it all (incl my darkroom equip) in the 90’s after settling down.  Kept just a couple of cameras).  One was indeed an Oly SLR with a 28 wide angle.

Then along came Digital.  Egad it sucked at first!  But boy was it fun!  

The rest as they say, is History!

R2