What is a 35mm prime lens?
In the world of DSLR lenses the 35mm prime lens is a widely revered one. It is a standard fixed focal length lens with sharp image quality and practical everyday use. Mind you this is not a zoom lens. So, the only way you could zoom is if you move your feet. Too tight a frame? Step back a few paces. Too much negative space around the subject? Step forward for a tighter composition. As you can imagine this is not the type of lens that would make zoomers happy. Prime lenses are designed for optical superiority and they are widely considered as a hard working photographer’s lens.
Prime lenses vs. zoom lenses
You may have heard protographers going ga-ga over the quality of prime lenses. This debate of prime vs. zoom will always find arguments on either side. We are not going to delve too much into this. One thing I would, however, mention is primes are primed (pun intended) for optical superiority. Zoom lenses have too much on their plate and that sometimes tend to weigh down on their performance.
Advantages of the 35m prime
The 35mm prime is considered as a standard prime. The 50mm and the 40mm prime lenses are also considered as standard primes. Standard being close to the focal length of the human eye. While that is just a statement and warrant a much deeper discussion (beyond the purview of this article), consider just this – a standard prime gives us the same angle of view which is roughly the equivalent of the human eye.
35mm prime lenses come optimized for both full-frame 35mm as well as crop sensor powered cameras. Canon currently, however, don’t sell a lens specifically designed for its smaller crop sensor cameras. Nikkor on the other hand does. Having said that EF-S mount cameras can use lenses designed for the EF mount. Thus Canon’s 35mm lenses designed for full-frame cameras work on its smaller sensor cameras.
A 35mm lens when mounted on APS-C sensor based digital cameras gives a slightly smaller angle of view. This happens because of the crop factor. For those who are not aware of this, very quickly, the crop factor denotes what the effective focal length will be when a lens designed for a bigger camera is used on a smaller camera (given the lens mount is compatible). This happens because the sensor behind the lens is only going to use a small portion of the image coming through the lens.
On a Nikon DX format camera the crop factor is 1.5. Which means a 35mm prime becomes a 52mm prime. On a Canon the crop factor is 1.6. It results in the angle of view becoming the same as a 56mm lens mounted on a 35mm camera. Focal lengths (and effective focal lengths) are always expressed in 35mm format terms.
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Ergonomics, weight and build quality
35mm lenses are no-fuss optical tools. They are, as mentioned before, designed for optical superiority and that gives them a real edge compared to zoom lenses. Even the cheapest prime lens will give a well-made zoom lens a run for its money.
35mm primes are lighter compared to zooms that cover the same focal length. This is because zoom lenses are composed of a number of lens elements which enable it to alter the focal length. It also has focusing elements and in some cases image stabilization elements too. On top of it modern auto-focusing lenses have AF motors built into them. All that adds to the bulk. Comparatively, older lenses such as the legendary Nikkon 35mm f/1.4 manual focusing lens has no image stabilization, no auto-focusing motor and no zoom lens elements. It is lighter but is designed with a single purpose – optical superiority. You won’t get anything as sharp and with such beautiful color rendition, even though the lens is more than three decades old!
Maximum aperture
Another benefit of the 35mm prime and for that matter all primes is that they are blessed with fast apertures. Faster apertures does two things. A - They gather more light, which, especially in low light situations, can help you to capture better images sans noise. The second benefit is you can really close down the depth of field to a narrow slit of focus obliterating everything else in the frame. Such shallow depths of field has its own uses in photography. It is capable of producing beautiful bokeh; something that is imperative for isolating a subject from its background.