When I worked in a camera shop in the early 1980s we used to sell ninety percent of the camera bodies with a standard lens. Olympus, Pentax, Nikon, Canon, Minolta, Ricoh and a few others all came in a kit with a 50mm lens. By default almost every camera owner ended up with a decent quality pretty fast and actually very versatile bit of glass. Even before I took that job my second SLR (an Olympus OM10) came with a Zuiko 50mm f1.8 and I kept that lens as long as I had Olympus cameras. They were cheap and did the job at a time when very few people shot with zoom lenses.

Since then I have owned over a dozen other 50mm prime lenses as well as two different 55mm ones. At no point in the period from 1981 until today have I been without at least one 50mm optic. At one point I had no fewer than four Canon fifties: f1.0, f1.4 f1.8 and the f2.5 macro. I swapped the f1.0 for an f1.2 a few years ago and it was only comparatively recently that I culled my collection to the point that I “only” have three; the EF 50mm f1.2L, EF 50mm f1.4 USM and the relatively recent RF 50mm f1.8 STM. The two EF lenses will be going soon and it looks as if my collection of fifties will be down to a single lens for the first time since 1995.

So how much do I actually use a fifty? The honest answer is “not often enough” but when I am in the mood for simple images it is the one lens that definitely gets added to the bag. That wasn’t always the case with the rather bulky f1.0 and f1.2 options but the various f1.4 and f1.8 (and even a short-lived Nikon f2.0) have always been small and light enough to be popped-into whichever Domke or LowePro I was using at the time. When I did an assessment of which focal lengths I shot most with then the 45mm-55mm range on various zooms provided me with a surprising number of ‘keepers’.

In all honesty, I actually prefer a 35mm lens as a general walk-around option and I blogged about why that might be a few years ago. I’d rather shoot people with an 85mm or even a 135mm most of the time but I’ve never been without a fifty and I don’t want to start now.

My most recent RF 50mm f1.8 is tiny, lightweight and pretty damned good. It isn’t as quiet as you’d like it to be and there’s only one ring with the option of being for focusing or exposure control and so it will never be a perfect lens but, by modern standards, it’s pretty good value for money and with the winter coming soon having a lens that fast will give me some extra creative options.

Here is a list of those that I definitely remember (in the order in which I remember acquiring them), but there may well have been others:

• Zenith Industar 50mm f3.5
• Olympus Zuiko 50mm f1.8
• Olympus Zuiko 50mm f1.4
• Leica 50mm f2.0 Summicron
• Nikon Nikkor 50mm f2.0
• Nikon Nikkor 50mm f1.4
• Nikon Nikkor 50mm f1.8
• Nikon Nikkor 55mm f1.2
• Nikon Nikkor 55mm f2.8 Macro
• Canon EF 50mm f1.0 L USM
• Canon EF 50mm f1.8
• Canon EF 50mm f1.4 USM
• Canon EF 50mm f1.2 L USM
• Canon EF 50mm f2.5 Macro
• Canon RF 50mm f1.8 STM

You can add various 75mm, 80mm and 90mm lenses from medium format systems and a 150mm for a 5″x4″ camera that I also had. That’s a lot of standard lenses…