Why your first lens should be 35 mm
These days shooting with actual film has become trendy again. All mechanical film cameras promise an experience like no other. In German, where you can string nouns together to any length, “Erlebnissfotografieren” describes this type of photography, for only $5,000, you can join the tribe in comfort. Whether there is a role for film photography today, is a debate for another time. For argument’s sake, let us assume you want to try. I remember photography as time spent with my dad and want to recreate that bonding experience with my son.
Where do you start this, Erlebniss? Your camera has no batteries, no autofocus, or even no light meter. Most limiting, you have only 24 exposures per roll of film. Every picture counts. You cannot bracket exposures if you want to bracket poses. You don’t see what kind of image you just shot, and for most, you will not push or pull the film but rely on a commercial provider to print.
This is photography in the decisive moment in its purest form. That one image will never come back and cannot be reproduced. A film, unlike iPhone memory, cannot be cloned and copied.
Enough with the introduction. Why choose a 35 mm prime as your first lens? It is the most straightforward lens form to make and, thus, the cheapest to buy. There are no motors in a prime lens (remember your camera has no battery) and thus no wear and tear. For film resolution, which is less than 100 MP, any twenty-year-old design is plenty sharp and does not need modern APO correction for film.
35 mm is the most error-tolerant focal length, ever.
First, 35 mm does not distort like a wide-angle lens. You can shut it upside down from any angle and distance, and the object proportions will all look natural. At wider angles, you’ll get big toes, noses, and converging/ bending lines if held off center or the horizon line. In a film camera, you will notice it until the film is developed, and then you cannot go back.
Second, the 35 mm lets in a lot of light. That is important because you cannot change your film ISO between shots. ISO800 is as sensitive as you will get, and 1/60 is the slowest you can do handheld. A short telephoto lens (75–120 mm) quickly becomes limiting as the sun sets or clouds move in.
With a 35 mm lens, 60 sec/f 5.6/ISO 400 will work 90% of the time, and the depth of field at that setting is such that everything will be in focus anyway. If it is sunny: “f8 and be there”.
Why not start with a 50 mm like the master? As Henri Cartier-Bresson famously said, “Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst.” This translates into 400 rolls of film. 35 mm means you have to be less precise in your framing. It adds a comfortable margin of error. 35 mm film has a 24mm x 36mm aspect ratio (8x12). So I print my photos at 12x18 and then with a ruler and knife, or digitally select the best 8x12 crop — sometimes even a square crop. A 50 mm lens does not give you that option.
If you step down 35 mm to f2, you get a nice bokeh and can still focus manually. I do have a 50 mm/ f1.4 sumilux. I love it, but I need ten exposures to nail the focus on the front eye; that would be half a roll of film. Furthermore, anyone other than a paid model would have walked away by then.
I hope this little editorial helped get you excited to invest and start trying to break through the 10,000 photograph barrier of mechanical photography. It is indeed a very different experience.
