People often ask for my advice on what lens to buy.

My usual reply: "Have you got a 50mm lens yet?"

If i could, i’d shoot everything on my Canon 50mm f/1.4 lens.

It’s a nice mid perspective, not quite wide, not real close. It works well in low light. You can lower the aperture and get lovely depth of field, crisp foreground and beautiful blurry background. It’s small. It’s humble.

It’s also cheap, especially in the f/1.8 variety. Canon users can have it for About US$100. Nikon US$130.

But this is not (only) a sales pitch for a lens, it’s an overlong introduction to a set of photos i’m calling "50 Portraits".

50 photos of people all taken with my 50mm lens.

It’s not a planned project, just something that seemed like a nice collection in hindsight.

50 portraits of people from all walks of life; young, old, black, white, gay, straight, men, women, rich, poor, strangers, friends, celebrities.

See the series in fullscreen.

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I recently treated myself to a camera upgrade, dropping silly money on a new Canon 5D.

It’s given me a renewed love for some of my old lenses, primarily the Canon 50mm f1.4 and Tamron 17-35mm f2.8.

Because the 5D has a full frame sensor it means all my lenses are now a little wider than on my Canon Rebel XT (350D). So the 50mm is now wide enough to take reasonably close portraits and the 17-35mm is super wide.

These are some recent shots taken with the 50mm lens with little or no photoshopping.

The other lovely thing with the 50mm lens coupled with the 5D is that i can shoot in really low light since the lens has a f1.4 aperture and the 5D does well at high ISO values. Each of these were taken in quite dim light and i like the muted, not quite sharp nature of them. It reminds me of film more than any other digital i’ve used.

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