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OntheRez wrote:
Gary, looking at your work, I can see why/how the 50mm performs so well for you. Given the static (well relatively so) nature of your subjects, that paper thin DOF produces some lovely images. I can also see how much more intimate/non-intrusive it is.
I don't do portrait, party, quinceañeras, bar/bat mitzvahs, or weddings, (aaagh, he runs off screaming thus the value of the 50mm would be wasted on me. Still, your pix give me insight into why the 50mm is still around, and what it can do.
If I remember correctly, Cartier-Bresson only used a 50mm lens (on earlier Leicas). In the hands of a master a branch can become a tree.
Robert...Show more →
That's a bit of a myth about Cartier-Bresson. I believe he mainly used a 50, but not exclusively. I read somewhere that he often carried and sometimes used a 35mm and 90mm in addition to the 50mm. There's a first hand account online by a guy who worked with HCB for a few days late in his career and he reports that for 3 days HCB used a 35mm lens almost exclusively.
Here is HCB speaking about lenses in an interview published in the NY Times:
Q. "Why the 50-millimeter lens?"
A. "It corresponds to a certain vision and at the same time has enough depth of focus, a thing you don’t have in longer lenses. I worked with a 90. It cuts much of the foreground if you take a landscape, but if people are running at you, there is no depth of focus. The 35 is splendid when needed, but extremely difficult to use if you want precision in composition. There are too many elements, and something is always in the wrong place. It is a beautiful lens at times when needed by what you see. But very often it is used by people who want to shout. Because you have a distortion, you have somebody in the foreground and it gives an effect. But I don’t like effects. There is something aggressive, and I don’t like that. Because when you shout, it is usually because you are short of arguments."
Part 1: http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/henri-cartier-bresson-living-and-looking/
Part 2: http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/21/cartier-bresson-there-are-no-maybes/
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