50mm is not popular?

[alexmart]

Hi guys I'm new here and I have just one question. Is 50mm lens is not so popular for film shooting? as one old school man said me

What do you think?

 

[scoffey3214]

By most standards, a 50mm lens would be classified as a "normal" lens, meaning that distances and spacial relationships would appear on the screen pretty close to how they would appear in real life. That being said, it's not intrinsically interesting just in the way that it projects 3D space. This might be useful in situations where you would want the viewer to be focused on dialouge or some other non-visual element, such as a shot/reverse shot conversation scene.

Also, the 50mm lens wouldn't have quite the field of view as a wider lens, essentially meaning that the lens can't "see" as much, and also has a shallower depth of feild, meaning that that there will be a smaller region of space that can be in focus at any given time.

Now, this might be what you're after, but in most cases, people find it more interesting to use wider lenses, where spacial distances will be exaggerated, or long lenses, where spacial planes will be compressed. In the end it really boils down to choices in style. In some cases, depending on the look and feel a particular film is supposed to have, a 50mm is a perfectly appropriate choice, but it seems that most people don't want their shots classified as "normal," and a 50mil lens is about as normal as they come.

 

[tinx]

it really depends on what you're shooting, and the format you're shooting in.

16mm? 35mm?

for a 16mm camera your 50mm will act like a telephoto lens

if you're shooting on those HDSLRs, a 50mm is good to have as the image size is close to that of a 35mm film cam

but you should really have a variety of lenses... or you can go with a zoom.

 

[Lazlo]

I'm going to make some clarifications, because there were some factual inaccuracies in the second response by Scoffy3214

A 50mm lens roughly sees the same information that you see if one eye is closed. This lens is neither considered a wide angle, nor telephoto. it is the dividing line between lenses that are viewed to have a bias towards revealing more, and those that focus in on specific things such as people, faces, actions (telephoto). While a 50mm lens certainly has less depth of field than a wide angle (i.e. 35<), and not as much as a telephoto (i.e. 100>), it can be used in a variety of situations under different circumstances. It has the unique attribute of being being manipulated to fit many different needs. To use the depth of field example, especially in film work, it becomes very arbitrary, since depth of field is determined just as much by object and distance to background as it is by lens choice. It is possible for a 24mm lens to have depth of field given the right distances between lens to object to background.

I think classifying it as "normal" and boring is an oversimplification. It's just another tool in the toolbox. It has its uses and its drawbacks. One could certainly make a case that it is the most versatile of lenses. But like most things in film, it has its strengths and its weaknesses. It is well balanced and doesn't have the same level of distortion that you would experience with a wider lens. It mostly comes down to personal taste, but I would just urge you not to dismiss it as "normal". It represents an invisible line in perspective that has like most things in film (i.e. 3 points lighting), been simplified to a point where the logic no longer seems practical.

 

[David Mullen ASC]

Remember that the notion of a 50mm as a "normal" lens is a holdover from 35mm still photography where the negative is 8-perf / Full Frame. On a 4-perf 35mm cine camera, it looks a bit more telephoto; you'd have to use a 35mm-ish lens to get the same view.

That said, early motion pictures shot extensively with the 50mm; movies in the Studio Era were predominantly made up of medium shots and medium close-ups. Wide shots were often done on a 35mm. Those two lenses were used for the bulk of shooting (especially for 3-strip Technicolor cameras). Occasionally you had DP's like Gregg Toland and James Wong Howe using a 25mm lens.

By the late 1950's, you started seeing the use of an 18mm lens for wide-angle shots (like in "Touch of Evil") and 100mm and longer in movies by Kurosawa.

Also keep in mind that before the widescreen era, movies were 1.37 Academy. Once they started cropping them to 1.85 in the mid 1950's, the vertical view of lenses was reduced making them feel a bit more constrained, so a 50mm started feeling even tighter than before.

A 50mm lens is still commonly used, I can't imagine a lens package without one. It's just that modern movies use a wider range of focal lengths than before (partly driven by the use of zooms), so the 50mm is used less often relative to other choices. But it is still very valuable.