Forty is the new Fifty
This originally appeared as part of my weekly Prime Lenses Newsletter. You can sign up for a weekly update here.
It started about 2 years ago. I’d been using the GRIII for a couple of years. I took it everywhere, and whenever I encountered another photographer I would wax lyrical about how wonderful it was but how I wished it had a 35mm field of view rather than 28mm. Then, seemingly from nowhere, Ricoh announced a 40mm GRIIIx model which immediately prompted Alice to say,
“You can’t complain about it for years and then not buy it when they make the camera you want.”
So buy it I did, selling my original GRIII to my friend Mark to fund the upgrade.
Soon after that I started to notice 40mm lenses cropping up more and more. James Popsys was talking about it being the best focal length, The Frame Lines guys too, and Kai Wong pre-dated the lot of them! Nikon brought out the Z mount 40, there’s a classic styled SE version too which I know a bunch of folks including previous guests Dan Milnor and Danny Bligh are fans of.
In short, 40mm, the forgotten natural focal length is back. And when I say forgotten, I can sort of prove it using science. Look at this data from Google Trends comparing 40mm to 50mm since 2004.
I typically shoot at 35 or 50 and do wonder whether I could potentially split the difference with a 40 and leave the other lenses at home. There’s a lovely old 40 f/2 Summicron which also has a Minolta equivalent that many of my M mount peers rate but what holds me back is that I never really gelled with that field of view on the Ricoh GRIIIx. For all of my chatter over the years about 35, the 28/f2.8 combination became so familiar that I struggled to get results I really liked at 40 and was fairly content to part with it. I’ve since bought a contrasty modern 28 for my M to give me that similar feeling with my current camera.
I’m so perpetually online and have given so much information to the various algorithms I interact with that it’s impossible for me to ignore a photographic trend and now that Leica are in the mix with the Q3 43 and all my favourites are singing its praises I may have to try it out again on a full frame, just so I know for sure.
The Invention of the Snapshot
The lovely folks over at Vox have a habit of making great videos and this one about the history of Kodak is well put together. I didn’t realise how much film cameras had cost relative to now back when they became popular.
