Yesterday afternoon I set out on another walk around the neighborhood to get out of the house and get some fresh air while my wife rested. Like I said in the other blog post, I’ve been dealing with a dose of lens indecision lately (when am I not, I guess), waffling around between the 28, 40, and 50mm choices. I spent a lot of time poring over the images I’ve made in the last few months trying to narrow down a consistent focal length that I seemed to work best with but all I did was find that no matter what lens I put on my camera I just go out and kind of make it work. Which, obviously leaves me nowhere.
My last walk I took the 28 so this time I opted for taking the 40mm.
I’ve written quite a bit about my feelings on the 40mm. It’s a kind of a goldilocks focal length, very close to that perfect “normal” focal length of 43mm on a full frame sensor. It’s also nicely situated between 28 and 50 while still retaining that nicer, natural feeling compression of the a 50mm lens. On paper it’s a perfect focal length, with the likes of Sally Mann referring to the focal length as, “About right.” If it’s about right for Sally Mann it’s probably about right for me. And in practice the little Voigtlander Heliar is a gem of a lens, for reasons beyond its focal length.
The Heliar lens design is a pretty simple optical formula, 5 elements in 3 groups, and this 40/2.8 version is also aspherical. The result is a lens that is wildly sharp across the frame but still has a very pleasant, natural rendering. Sharp, but a kind of organic sharpness. I’ve said this before but it reminds me of something like my very old 1930’s Leica Elmar 50/3.5, which is also a very simple optical design and rendered with an equally beautiful simplicity.
One of the things I sometimes struggle with with the 40 is its closeness to a 35mm, which can kind of leave it feeling like it sits in that weird no man’s land between the slightly tele 50mm and the wider 28mm. Coming from just shooting the 28 the day before I did find the added “punch-in” factor of going to a 40mm a nice change. One of the limitations of shooting this stuff around where I live is that I can only get so close before I’m encroaching on people’s property. In just about every one of these photos I’m standing as close as I can get without jumping a fence or taking a step in to someone’s yard. This does also make the 50mm a nice option for being able to hone in and narrow my focus when it’s difficult to step in closer to the subject. The 40 does have some of that quality compared to a 28 but sometimes it's still a decent bit wider than a 50 when you compare them side by side.
Regardless, I was pretty pleased with what I was able to pull off with the 40. I think I can safely stash the 28 away in the basement at this point. It’s a fun lens to dig out and get wild with for a day or two but as a “leave on the camera” lens it’s just too wide to be useful across a wide range of circumstances, and my brain likes the simplicity of a one camera/one lens kind of setup. Maybe the one lens will be the 40 for a little while. God knows I’ve shot enough 50mm in my life, or, maybe that’s for a reason… Give me a day or two and I’ll have a completely different answer for you. In years past I would always sell of spare equipment to force myself to just work with a limited set of tools. I’m starting to think there was a lot of wisdom in that.
And as always, the obligatory gallery of additional images at the end of the post:
