Familiarity that transcends the bounds of time and marketing

Familiarity brings friendship, which is why my favorite lens is the lens I've owned the longest...The 50mm lens for my 35mm camera. I don't have a particularly fancy 50mm lens. It's not f/0.95 or even f/1.4. It's just a plain old f/1.8 lens. Dead simple to make and so well corrected that just about any 50mm lens you buy is good enough.

One of the benefits of shooting Canon FD gear is that certain corners that were cut by Canon later on weren't cut. Modern 50mm f/1.8 lenses are pretty much disposable. There's plastic gearing and a small motor inside to drive the autofocus and pretty much if you knock the lens just right, the gearing will crack and the lens will break and you'll buy another one. Even the f/1.4 isn't that great in terms of long-term reliability, according to my 50mm-lens-breaking-friend Norby.

About the only thing wrong about the FD version of the f/1.8 is the lack of autofocus, the inability to work on any modern camera, and only having five leaves to the aperture iris.

My Canon TX and the 50mm lens are very comfortable. I've had it for most of my life, actually.

Anyway, a funny thing happened the other day. I was using another photographer's camera. It was the Canon 5D and it had the EF 50mm f/1.8 lens on it. And even though there was autoexposure and autofocus and mostly plastic, it still felt oddly familiar to take a shot. Even though everything but the basic optical design of the lens had changed in the intervening decades.

Some things will never change, I guess.

Comments

I had an excellent bike ride over the weekend. Biked up a mountain and then ended up biking a bunch more after that. Took pictures, and the end distance biked was 50 miles.