I'm playing around with the various camera lenses I own, which include a rarely-used fixed 50mm focal length. This is "rarely used" because a good deal of what I use the camera for is taking pictures of the kids, and the separation needed to get them in frame with this lens is really difficult to maintain.
The cool thing about it is that it has a really large aperture, so you can get an extremely narrow depth of field, which makes for some cool focus effects. The lack of zoom capability is a bit of a challenge, in that if you want to frame a shot a particular way, you need to physically walk back and forth to get in just the right spot. It's kind of an interesting constraint, though, and I can see spending some time playing with this. For now, here's a playing-around shot of a weed next to the pond in our back yard.
This is scaled but not cropped. It might've been better to be a hair father to my right for this (to move the weed a little farther from the rocks, and closer to the fountain), but it was kind of an inconvenient place to stand as it was. And I'm not unhappy with this.
So, you know, I'm enjoying playing around. I'll probably use this lens to do some science at some point, but I need to think about the best way to do that....
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This tended to be the main lens on SLR's in the 1970s and 1980s. Zooms came later I once had a 50 mm f 1.4 lens for example.
Keep in mind the older film SLRs were full-frame cameras. The T6i that Chad is using has a cropped sensor. Using a 50 mm lens on that camera is the equivalent of using a 75 mm lens on the full-frame sensor. That narrows the field of view enough to make it very frustrating to use for portraits in an enclosed space like a normal-sized room.
I have a lens like this... If I focus on my husband's nose, the eyes are already out of focus ;) Here is one of my favorite shots
https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/a9TJPCQNoi69DVA0sdUzGdMTjNZETYmyP…
My 50mm f1.8 is my favorite lens. Yes, it's limiting in a lot of situations, which is why I have a good 24 - 85mm, but I only use that if I have to, the prime lens takes much sharper shots.
Joe @2, my Nikon body is full frame sensor, and the difference between it and my older crop sensor body isn't all that much when framing, but the larger sensor is brighter by a significant amount. I would chalk that up to being newer, but the D300 that was contemporary with my older camera body took much brighter shots with the same lenses. I'd be curious about Chad's thoughts on why that might be.