Prime Lens Project, Month 6 - the home stretch

The final month of my prime lens project has been mostly devoted to getting closer to the subjects I’ve photographed. My chosen lens was my Olympus 60mm f2.8 macro lens - the perfect tool for getting up close and personal. I’d always intended to save it for April as I figured we’d have more flowers blooming in our garden. Little did I realise when I started this that all my photos this month would be taken within about a mile of home!

I started the month with flowers, using a fallen tulip from our garden as an indoor still life subject, through its various stages of decay. A very welcome bonus was the early blooming of the bluebells in our local woods, which put on a fabulous display.

Inspired by a friend who specialises in photographing Lego minifigures I also dug out my Lego photographer, who I christened Henri, as an assistant on my macro missions. He tagged along with me on various walks around the village and added a different slant to my images.

This is a gallery of my pictures from the month, all taken with the macro lens, although not all of them are, strictly speaking, macro photos.

Please click on any of the thumbnail images to see the pictures full size. All images taken around Elsenham.

That brings my prime lens project to an end. Strictly speaking, I could continue for one more month, shooting with my fisheye lens. However, I’m not sure I can face a month of shooting with such a specialised lens when I can only photograph around our village. Perhaps it’s something I can return to later in the year when I can get out and shoot a greater variety of subject.

So what have I learnt from this project?

Fundamentally it’s confirmed to me the strengths of shooting with prime lenses. When using a single focal length I work much harder to find my compositions, often walking around a subject until I find the right angle and shooting distance. Yes, there are shots I have missed out on because the lens I was carrying wasn’t suitable. However, if I know my ability to move around is going to be limited I will take a zoom lens with me for flexibility.

Shooting with one focal length for extended periods has made me appreciate the qualities of the various lenses and helped me to learn which ones suit my style of photography best. I’ve grown to love my 42.5mm lens, even though I’m not a portrait photographer, and I was surprised how easily I adjusted to shooting wide angle when I used the 12mm lens in March. The hardest month was definitely February, as I wrestled with my 75mm lens. It’s an absolute gem of a lens, but rather specialised and not one I would select as a sole lens for a photographic outing.

I will of course continue to shoot with primes, but that’s not to say there isn’t a time and a place for zoomability! All I need to do now is figure out which lens to take when I got for my lockdown walk today now I have no restrictions….

Prime Lens Project, Month 4 - the challenging one!

I’ve really enjoyed my prime lens project…. until I decided to go telephoto!


All the lenses I’ve used so far are ones I was already fairly familiar with - they tend to be the ones I instinctively put in my bag when I’m heading out and about. For February I picked the Olympus 75mm f1.8 lens - an absolutely jewel but not the most natural focal length for me. For street photography I naturally gravitate to standard or wide angle lenses, while for wildlife I’ll often be found toting my 100-400mm lens (an effective focal length of 200-800!).

The 75mm (EFL 150mm) lives slap bang in the centre of this range. Were I a portrait photographer it would be invaluable for its flattering effect and ability to create soft, blurred backgrounds. The nearest I get to this is candid street photography and I quickly discovered it’s just too long for that purpose. It’s helpful to be able to see your moving subject in the viewfinder before you shoot, so you can plan where in the frame to capture them. At 75mm the field of view is narrow and I often found the person I was aiming for had left the frame again before I’d even pressed the shutter button!

So what about other genres of photography? A few times I used the 75mm when I was out and about in the countryside and in town. Here it came in handy for capturing distant details, and the way it apparently compresses the scene is undeniably lovely.

Don’t get me wrong, I love this lens and the look it gives me in the right situation. I’ll often use it when I’m doing event photography, usually capturing people at musical gatherings. Here it’s brilliant for pulling individual people out of a large crowd as you can reach into the scene and blur the surrounding individuals. Sadly I didn’t have any such opportunities during February!

By the end of February I’d developed something of a love/hate relationship with my 75mm lens. I knew this one would always be a challenge as it’s a more specialised optic than the others. I will continue to use it where there is a specific use case, but I don’t think it’s ever going to be a lens I naturally select as my soul focal length for a whole day.

So where next? We’re already well into March and I’ve gone to a different extreme for month five - a rather wide 12mm. You’ll have to wait until the beginning of April to hear more about that though!

Please click on any of the thumbnail images to see the pictures full size.

Images from Watchet harbour in Somerset, Thaxted, Saffron Walden, Hatfield Forest, Epping Forest and the City of London.




Prime Lens Project, Month 3 - getting closer

I can’t quite believe I’m three months into my prime lenses project now - where does the time go?!

My chosen lens for January was the Panasonic Leica 15mm f1.7 - an effective focal length of 30mm in full frame terms. Using a wider lens than in December meant I’ve had to shoot in a different way and I’ve enjoyed the challenges that has brought.

A moderately wide angle lens is great for architecture, one of my favourite subjects. You can fit a decent amount of the building into the frame, but the distortion is less dramatic than with a shorter focal length.

I’ve heard many people rave about this lens for street photography - its combination of sharpness, quick focusing, a fast aperture and the focal length are all helpful. However, my comfort zone for street work is a 25mm lens. I wasn’t going to let that stop me though and I spent a day in Cambridge working hard to get closer to people. It never fails to amaze me how few people even notice my camera - I guess it’s a sign of the times as everyone carries one these days, even if only on their smartphone.

Over the last few days I also had a work trip to Somerset and spent some time messing around on Minehead beach. Again, the crucial technique was to get close to my subjects and I was pleased with the mini-landscapes I was able to shoot.

Please click on any of the thumbnail images to see the pictures full size.

Images from Caernarfon Castle, walking the neighbour’s dog, Cambridge, Sheffield, Waltham Abbey, the Natural History and V&A Museums in Kensington and Minehead Beach.

So for month four I have a very different challenge ahead of me. I’ve chosen my 75mm lens. With an effective focal length of 150mm I’m going to have to either shoot entirely different sorts of subjects or get much further away. Either way, I’m going to have to re-calibrate the way my eyes see to make the best of the compression and magnification a telephoto prime can offer - watch this space for the results!

If you want to follow my Prime Lens Project as I publish my photos and perhaps even join in, please do follow the hashtag #primelensproject on Instagram.

Prime numbers

It’s now almost a year since I stopped my decade long 365 project. After taking a fresh photo every day for ten years I was ready for a break. It’s been liberating at times, knowing I don’t need to create a new image after a long day’s work. But in recent months I’ve missed using my camera so frequently. I always had a feeling that photographic addiction would be hard to shake off!

So what do I have planned to get me motivated again? Well, it’s a project that first occurred to me a few months ago, involving prime lenses.

What is a prime lens?

Put simply, a prime is a lens which shoots only at one focal length - as opposed to a zoom which can cover a range, from wide angle to telephoto. For a long while new cameras were sold with a prime lens, often a 50mm focal length. This was because zoom lens technology wasn’t great and prime lenses were invariably sharper. Over time zooms improved enormously and it’s now the norm for a kit lens to be a zoom of some sort.

So what’s so great about a lens which doesn’t zoom?

On the face of it, the restriction of a prime lens seems a disadvantage. After all, it means you have to walk to get closer to the subject of your photo, rather than simply turning your lens’s zoom ring. However, this very restriction can have benefits too.

When using a zoom it’s very easy to get rooted to the spot, using the lens to change your composition. This often makes us lazy and we work less hard to find the perfect image. It could be that moving a step or two sideways will make an infinitely better picture - for instance, it might mean the person you’re photographing no longer has a lamp post sticking out of their head!

Another factor people often overlook, or have no awareness of in the first place, is the effect different focal lengths have on the pictures we take. A wide angle lens is great for cramming loads of elements into a sweeping landscape photo, but it can make those elements seem distant and create an underwhelming end result. In contrast, a telephoto lens will appear to compress the scene, bringing compositional elements together. These factors mean the appropriate lens choice can be a very powerful tool. Using a zoom makes you less aware of your choice of focal length, whereas you make an active decision when selecting a prime lens to shoot with.

It’s worth mentioning at this stage that almost anyone who has taken photos with the camera on their mobile phone (unless you have one of the swanky new ones with multiple lenses!) has used a prime lens. The average smartphone camera has an effective focal length of about 28mm - fairly wide angle - so if you want to get closer you just have to walk!

Why do I use prime lenses?

I bought my first prime lens, a Canon 50mm f1.8, on a whim in our local camera shop back in about 2007. It was a twenty year old lens, costing just £59 and sounded like an angry bumble bee when focusing, but I loved it!

Prime lenses are simpler in design than zooms, so you tend to get a larger maximum aperture. This lets in more light and creates beautiful bokeh - that lovely creamy, blurred background effect. They also tend to be small and light and often cheaper too. Over the years I’ve accumulated a small collection of primes of different focal lengths and my camera bag will usually contain two or three of them at any one time.

My decision to use primes is largely as a result of seeing what they do for my pictures. As well as being able to creatively blur parts of the image, I find I think more creatively when using them. I’ll walk around a subject, using my viewfinder to locate the perfect spot to shoot from - the place where I get exactly the composition I’m after. After a while you learn to ‘see’ at the focal length of the lenses you use most, and I can predict fairly accurately how much I will get in the frame with a given lens from a certain distance.

I do still use zooms from time to time, although it tends to be in particular situations. For action or wildlife photography I use a long telephoto zoom lens - after all you can’t always walk closer to a bird or a speeding racing car! I’ll often choose zooms for event photography too, where I know I’ll be locked into one spot, unable to use my feet to zoom.

So what’s my big plan then?

Funnily enough it doesn’t require a big change to my shooting habits, but perhaps a more focused one.

As I’ve already said, each prime lens creates a different look and I want to exploit that more by using just a single lens. Occasionally I already leave the house with just one prime lens, but more often I’ll take a selection so I can swap when the mood takes me.

My plan for this project is to have at least one day each week when I use a single prime lens, making myself really utilise its individual qualities. I will use the same lens for a whole month so I can really understand it and learn to get the best out of it. Of course there will be some occasions when I just can’t limit myself to this single lens, so for this reason I’m only committing to a minimum of one day a week.

How long will this take?

At the moment I have six prime lenses, with effective focal lengths from 24 to 150mm. If I spend a month with each lens that should take me well into 2020. Some will be easy to use - 50mm for example. But the 150mm lens should challenge me significantly more. I’m starting off in November with my 25mm f1.4 lens (a 50mm equivalent for those who shoot on a full frame camera) - in fact I already started this afternoon.

How to follow my project…

If you want to see the photos that result from this project your best bet is to pop over to one of my two Instagram accounts: HelenHookerPhoto or HelenHookerArchitecture. I’ll label images with the hashtag #PrimeLensProject so you can also search for them that way. They’ll also be posted over on my Photoblog and you can search there with the same phrase.

This project isn’t as full on as committing to shooting every single day again - I’m not sure I’m quite ready for that yet! But it’ll give my photography a little more focus and will hopefully help me understand my lenses even better.

Why not join in?

If have a prime lens and fancy joining me on this adventure, please feel free to use the #PrimeLensProject on social media and I’ll create a post here every few weeks to let you know which focal length I’ll be using for the following month.

In case you’re wondering, the pictures dotted through this post are the first ones created for this project, taken during a visit to Audley End, with my 25mm lens. Who knows what I’ll aim it at next, but I’m already raring to go with this challenge!