My action cam fell over before we’d taken a single photo. Face down on a checkered floor, in a 1950s American diner in the middle of Da Nang, while the model I’d booked stood there waiting and a friend I’d invited was already screwing a 50mm onto his camera.
That friend is the reason this post exists. Because for one evening, in one room, with one person in front of us, we shot the same scene on two focal lengths. I had the 35mm that has been on my camera for the better part of ten years. He had a 50mm. Same light, same wall, same straw hat. Nobody had to imagine the difference.
The lens I never take off
Here is the embarrassing part. I own five lenses. I can tell you the exact rendering of each one. And for years, three of them have mostly lived in a drawer.
The Sigma 35mm f/1.4 goes on the camera, and it stays there. Not because I decided it was optimal. Because I put it on once, liked what came back, and never built the habit of taking it off. That is not a technical position. That is inertia wearing a technical costume.
The problem with inertia is that it looks like expertise from the outside. People ask what lens they should buy and I say “35mm” with the confidence of a man who has never seriously tested the alternative on the same night, in the same room, with the same person. I had opinions. I did not have a control group.
Cheri Lady gave me one by accident. It is a diner: red vinyl booths, a chrome counter, a wall of framed posters, and a pool table in the back. Big windows at the front, so the first half of the evening was free light. Nga has modelled for me long enough that she needs almost no direction, which meant I could stop thinking about her and start thinking about the glass.
And there was Nick, who had come along for the meetup, standing two metres to my left with a 50mm.
Is 35mm or 50mm better
The honest answer is that they are not competing for the same job, and almost every argument I have seen online treats them as if they are.
At 35mm, the room is in the photograph. You see the poster wall, the counter, the neon bleeding across the ceiling. The person is a figure inside a place. That is the entire reason I shoot it: I am usually photographing somebody somewhere, and the somewhere is half the point. Wide enough for context, long enough that a face does not stretch at the edges.
At 50mm, the room politely leaves. Nick’s frames from the same twenty minutes are tighter, calmer, more about the shoulder line and the hat brim than about the diner. Put them next to mine and it is not a quality difference. It is a subject difference. He photographed a person. I photographed a person in a diner.
There is a practical wrinkle nobody mentions. In a room this size, 50mm made Nick walk backwards into furniture. I could stand where I wanted. Focal length is not just a look — it is a set of instructions about where your feet go, and in a working restaurant those instructions matter more than the MTF chart.
Do I need a 50mm if I have a 35mm
If you shoot people in places, no. Not urgently.
If you shoot people, and the place is incidental, then yes — and you probably want it more than you want a second body.
What surprised me is how little the aperture argument mattered. I was wide open at f/1.4 all night. Nick was at f/1.8. At normal viewing sizes, in a dark room, I could not honestly tell you which frames had the thinner depth of field without checking the file. The gap between f/1.4 and f/1.8 is one third of a stop. The gap between 35mm and 50mm changed what the photograph was about. One of those is a rounding error and the other is a decision, and I have spent years paying attention to the wrong one.
The second surprise was focus. I keep the A7CR on continuous autofocus permanently, and out of the whole evening I had two frames where eye detection lost her. Two. At f/1.4, in a room lit by window light and neon. Five years ago that number would have been half the card, and I would have blamed myself instead of the technology, which in hindsight is also a kind of inertia.
What are the top three lenses every photographer should have
I get asked this constantly, and the standard answer is the “holy trinity” — 16-35, 24-70, 70-200. Three zooms, wall-to-wall coverage, roughly the price of a used car.
My actual three, after a decade: the Sigma 35mm f/1.4, the Samyang 85mm f/1.4, and the Tamron 35-150mm f/2-2.8. Two primes and a zoom, which is not the answer I would have given you five years ago. It is not a recommendation so much as a confession, because it maps exactly onto what I shoot rather than onto what is theoretically correct.
The 35 for people in places. The 85 when I want the background to stop existing. And the Tamron for the days when I cannot change lenses at all — I once shot an entire beach session on nothing else, and I have written a longer piece on why it might be the only lens you ever need if you want the full argument.
The most flattering focal length for portraits is usually quoted as 85mm to 135mm, and by the geometry of it, that is true — longer lenses flatten features, which is kind to most faces. But “flattering” and “interesting” are not the same word. Nothing at 85mm from that evening tells you we were in a diner in Vietnam. The 35mm frames do, and I will take the slightly less flattering nose to keep the neon.
The best portrait lens for Sony, if you want a straight answer
For a Sony body, and if you are only buying one: 35mm if you photograph people in environments, 50mm if you photograph people. The 50mm f/1.8 is also absurdly cheap, which is the real reason so many people start there — and it is not a bad place to start.
But I would push back on the framing of the question. After this shoot I am less sure that “best portrait lens” is a thing you can answer with a focal length. What actually changed my photographs that night was not glass. It was walking into a diner I had never been in, asking if I could shoot there, and having someone in front of the camera who moves slowly enough that every half-second is a slightly different frame.
That is the tip that survived the evening, by the way, and it costs nothing. Ask your model to keep moving, but slowly. Fast movement gives you blur and missed focus. Slow movement gives you options.
When the light ran out
Around eight the windows stopped giving and the diner’s own lamps took over. Nick left, came back with a pair of amaran Ace 25c pocket LEDs, and the last half hour was not natural light at all. I have been a natural-light-only photographer largely by preference and slightly by laziness — I have six tips on shooting beach light that say as much — and thirty minutes with two tiny continuous lights made me reconsider the laziness half.
That is the other thing about a room you did not plan for. It keeps making decisions for you until you run out of evening.
The gear
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- Sigma 35mm f/1.4 Art — the lens this post is mostly about: amzn.to/3WgpjAJ
- Sony A7CR — 61 megapixels, shot at ISO 2500 all night anyway: amzn.to/40axD6p
- amaran Ace 25c — the pocket LEDs that turned up at the end: amzn.to/4w9Mfkn
- DJI Pocket 4 — everything behind the scenes: amzn.to/3T7ZrZq
- Samyang 85mm f/1.4 — the second of my three: amzn.to/4fUcza0
- Tamron 35-150mm f/2-2.8 — the third, and the one I take when I cannot swap glass: amzn.to/45NkPr1
- Sony FE 50mm f/1.8 — what Nick shot on, and the other half of this comparison: amazon.com/dp/B01DLMD5O6
The 50mm frames in the video are Nick’s: @nevans_photography. The lights, and the good sense to go home and fetch them, were @sebazpictures.
More of this sort of thing on the UNFILTERED channel, and if you want to know who is writing this, there is an about page. The shoots themselves end up in the portfolio.
