I took the tiny FE 50mm f/2.5 G to a walk this evening, and I have to admit, I love the combination of small size, excellent mechanical quality and stellar optics. I thought the f/2.5 aperture would be insufficient for what I normally use a lens of this type for, but it turned out not to be an issue. It’s crisp, with modern image aesthetics and incredibly high resolution for something so small.
Assimilated
Nothingness
Fire of gold
Parched land
I listened to something on YouTube; comments about someone highly praising a lens he barely uses, and then people are asking why did he buy it in the first place. Well, not so fast. You don’t have to use a lens daily to have a need of it, or to appreciate it, or for it to earn a place in your toolkit. I have a huge list of my favourite photos that were made with lenses I rarely use. However, when I use them, the results usually tend to be my best work. If something is your favourite dish, it doesn’t mean you have to eat it every day. Frequency of use isn’t really tightly correlated with need. I need a lens if it enables me to make a particular type of photography. If that’s something I do once every five years, that’s quite a good reason for me to own such a lens. A fisheye is a good example. Do I need it? Absolutely. Some of my best work is with a fisheye. However, it’s a dozen photos over two decades.
Decomposing
Frequency of use means nothing to me. Quality of work, in those cases when use happens, means everything. The fact that a lens gathers dust for years on my shelf doesn’t mean anything to me. I need it there, when the right situation arises. A frequently used lens is merely a lens I take for a walk, and I will produce most of worthless and generic pictures with it. That also doesn’t mean that the lens is not good; it just means that I use it when probability of success is negligible. Either I don’t feel like taking pictures, or I think there are no motives, no light, but I still take the camera, just in case. However, a “just in case” lens will occasionally also take my best pictures, when I’m wrong, and I do find something worth photographing.
Film point-and-shoot
Phone
Because “case” occasionally happens when you don’t expect anything.
But where to draw the line? When is something rarely used because it’s useless? Well, that happens. I had lenses that turned out to overlap so much with other lenses, that I gave up on them and sold them. There are cameras and camera systems that I find good and useful, but something else was better. I don’t actually have to own everything I ever used to make a favourite picture. I had multiple standard zooms. They were all good. However, I only need one, and they all overlap in functionality and the results they produce. I already wrote that I have sentimentality for the pictures, not the equipment, and this sentimentality usually makes me like a lens type, rather than tying itself to a specific lens. Sometimes, sentimentality is tied to the specific time of day, with the light of specific colour, or the time of year when I felt something and captured it with photography. I don’t care that I no longer own a Minolta or an Olympus that captured it, if I have a Canon or a Sony with similar capabilities. Somehow, the sentimentality transcends specific hardware and translates across platforms. I’m weird that way. 🙂