Lesson 1: Shoot With Your Nifty Fifty
In this lesson: Learn how to harness the benefits of your 50mm lens

Shooting with a normal focal length lens like a 50mm will better acquaint you with how to handle your camera. It is also an ideal lens to help you improve your creative vision.

“Nifty Fifty” refers to a 50mm normal photographic lens. We use the term “normal” because it most accurately reproduces what we naturally experience with our own vision. Normal lenses are often unfairly classified as the “poor cousins” in the lens family because you can often find a 50mm lens for far less money than telephoto or wide-angle lenses. In reality, however, 50mm lenses have a number of significant advantages over telephoto or wide angle lenses.

Before we begin, please note:

A 50mm lens is the normal focal length for a 35mm film camera or full-frame DSLR. For APS-C crop sensor DSLRs, 35mm is considered the normal lens.
Because of crop factors, a 50mm lens will behave like a longer focal length on a crop factor camera. For example, a 50mm lens on a camera with a 1.6x crop factor will have an effective focal length of 80mm. On a 1.3x crop factor camera, a 50mm lens will have an effective focal length of 65mm.
If you don’t own a prime normal lens, simply set your zoom lens to the desired focal length (i.e. 50mm) and anchor it in place by wrapping the lens with gaffer’s tape.

With that, let’s explore a few advantages that the Nifty Fifty offers photographers.
50mm Prime Lenses Have Fewer Moving Parts
Prime lenses, or fixed focal length lenses, have fewer moving parts than their zoom counterparts. As a result, prime lenses like the Nifty Fifty produce images that are sharper from edge to edge than comparable zoom lenses. They have less distortion and generally produce less chromatic aberration than wide-angle and telephoto lenses as well. In short, 50mm lenses produce high-quality images. Not only that, with fewer parts, there’s less elements that can break, making maintenance and upkeep easier and less expensive.
50mm Lenses are Usually Very Fast

The term “fast lens” refers to a lens that has a wide maximum aperture – with a wide aperture it is more capable of getting good results in low-lighting situations. Many 50mm lenses come in f/1.4 or f/1.8 variants. To put that in perspective, an f/1.8 50mm lens is eight times faster than a typical 18-55m f/5.6 kit lens. With that ability to collect more light, the 50mm lens can capture noise-free images in much worse lighting conditions than many other lenses.

What’s more, with that wide aperture, you can create images like the one above, with a subject that’s in sharp focus and a nicely blurred background behind it. Controlling for depth of field – the range of the scene that’s in focus – is handled in part by the aperture selected. The larger the aperture, the greater the ability you’ll have to blur the background. Since 50mm lenses usually have large maximum apertures, getting this effect is easier.
50mm Lenses Can Be Inexpensive
As noted earlier, 50mm lenses are very budget-friendly. And, since budget is a crucial factor for most photographers, it makes the Nifty Fifty an attractive lens. In some cases, you can find a brand-new 50mm f/1.8 lens for less than $200, and often for far less than that. That means you can get a great lens for less money, and utilize your savings to add additional equipment to your kit.
50mm Lenses Are Highly Versatile

If there is a versatile prime lens, it’s the Nifty Fifty. Use it on a full frame camera for landscape photography to capture wider scenes that incorporate the subject and its surroundings, as was done in the image above.

Or, you can put it on a camera with an APS-C sensor and use if for portraiture. Recall that with a crop sensor, the effective focal length of a 50mm lens becomes longer. So, when shooting with a camera with a 1.6x crop factor, you can create portraits like the one above, that look as though they were taken with a longer lens. That means you can make portraits without having to be as close to the subject, giving them more space to relax in front of the camera.

You can even reverse mount a 50mm lens to a full frame or crop sensor camera and create macro shots like the one above, assuming you purchase reverse mount rings. The point, however, is that whether it’s landscapes or architecture, food photography or weddings, the Nifty Fifty can get it done. As a result of that versatility, a 50mm lens is an ideal lens to help you expand your photography boundaries into areas you never thought possible.

Let’s start expanding those boundaries!
Challenge Activity

Often, the hardest thing for creative minds to do is tap into their creativity close to home. This challenge activity will help you use a normal lens like a Nifty Fifty in an ordinary situation to make an extraordinary image.

Step 1: Capture the essence of your own neighborhood. The example above demonstrates what can be achieved with a Nifty Fifty and an otherwise normal daily scene. Combining the right light with strong elements like leading lines, textures, and saturated colors, and you can create a compelling image.

Step 2: Walk along a path with your camera mounted on a tripod. Stop to capture an image every 20 steps. Each time you stop, change the camera height and the angle you use to photograph the path. Additionally, note how the changes in your shooting location and height of the camera alter the composition of the image from one photo to the next.

Step 3: In a street or landscape setting, draw a circle on the ground. Using only your normal lens, see how many well-composed photos you can capture from within that circle. Remember to look for elements that add interest to your shots – lines, shapes, textures, or colors, for example.