What a single focal length teaches you about seeing. Thirty days, fifty millimetres, and no way to zoom with anything but my feet.
Thirty days, one fifty-millimetre lens, and no way to zoom with anything but my feet. I went to Rajasthan with a bag full of glass and made myself leave all of it but one at the hotel.
What a fixed lens teaches
A single focal length stops being a limitation by the second week. You begin to see in it — to know, before you raise the camera, exactly what fifty millimetres will hold and what it will leave out. The framing happens in your head, on the walk over.
Constraints don't shrink the work. They sharpen the eye.
By the end of the month I was making better photographs than I had with the whole kit. Fewer choices, more attention. I've never fully gone back.
