THE PRIME LENS PROJECT By David Travis ARPS
Summary Over a period of 5 days, I shot the same landscape with 5 different prime lenses. I found that each lens has a different personality and made me see the landscape differently.
Introduction When I first got into photography I was a bit of a lens snob. I dismissed zoom lenses and instead aimed to collect a range of prime lenses in the belief that the image quality would be better. With experience, I discovered that the quality of a modern zoom lens is indistinguishable from most prime lenses. And as I get older, I prefer carrying a couple of zoom lenses to hauling around a backpack full of primes — especially since a zoom lens is more flexible. But that flexibility comes at a cost. Sometimes it’s good to give yourself constraints — psychologists tell us that constraints actually enhance creativity. So during one of the pandemic lockdowns, I decided to blow the dust off my prime lenses and mount a different one each day on my Olympus EM-1 Mk II. I wanted to examine how each lens made me see differently. I do the same dog walk in the morning, a circular route of a mile or so, and it takes in a canal, bridges, some woodland, and a fishing lake. I took around 30-60 photos each day and then went through each collection to identify the two I liked the most. To make the comparison meaningful, I didn’t allow myself to do any significant post processing (like cropping the images or cloning out distractions). I just allowed myself basic exposure and contrast enhancements in Lightroom. Here are my thoughts on each focal length.
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July 2021 Volume 6 Number 5
