Conventional wisdom states your money is better spent on a good quality lens than on the camera body. And for the most part it’s a very good piece of advice - something like the Canon 85mm f/1.2L will produce stunning images mounted on a 1000D body, whereas even a Nikon D3x will struggle to take decent shots with the 18-55 kit lens in anything other than favourable conditions. There is, however an curious anomaly in this trend that occurs at precisely fifty millimetres.

By and large telephoto lenses are easy to design, optically but require some very large [read expensive] elements if you want a fairly wide maximum aperture. In contrast wide angle lenses have to bend light much further and apertures can only be so large without the use of sophisticated [read expensive] optical corrections.

The humble 50mm, once the standard ‘kit lens’ bundled with new SLRs happens to sit at the crossover point. The focal length is long enough to employ a simpler non-retrofocus design, which is tried and tested, with inexpensive elements keeping the manufacturing and assembly cost down. As a result you get a very large maximum aperture and good optical performance for what is relatively little money.

And mounted on a full frame 35mm body the selective focus is sublime…

MG