The Nifty Fifty Exercise
One of the best ways to learn photography is to challenge yourself with various exercises. Doing them regularly will help you develop your skills and experience, which will ultimately make you grow as a photographer.
One of my favorite exercises that I still do today after many years of being a photographer is shooting various subjects with a single lens. As the title might have suggested, this time I want to focus on the 50mm lens.
(Success Tip #1:Crazy new way to learn photography when you have little time to spare)
First of all, this is the kind of creative exercise you should be doing with a fixed lens. The whole point of it is to have just one focal length available to test and challenge your imagination and creative resources for nailing the shot with this limitation. You can use various lenses, but the focal lengths I recommend are 24mm, 35mm and 50mm. I've personally done it with a 105mm lens and I did manage to get a few good shots, but if you're new to photography, I recommend sticking to these 3 lenses.
Now, the nifty fifty is one of the most popular lenses and it's being used by both amateurs and professionals. There are several reasons for its popularity, but I'm not going to go through all of them now. But one of them is that the 50mm lens is very close to the human perspective. That makes it very versatile. It's also very cheap, so it has that going for it. The f/1.4 versions are a bit more expensive, but in my book they're worth the extra buck. If you already own a 50mm f/1.8 that's awesome. It will do the job just as well.
(Success Tip #2:The secret to selling more photography with less effort)
The next step is to go out shooting. Hit the streets and look around for subjects. If you enjoy taking portraits, ask random people to pose for you and try different compositions. Or perhaps you like colors and details. I'm sure there is plenty of interesting stuff in your area that's just waiting to be discovered. All it takes is a seeing from a different perspective and working with the limitations of the 50mm lens.
Here is a great video from Adorama TV with photographer Doug McKinlay showing how it's done: