The plan

A bit of fun with a 50mm lens.  That's the idea.  One shot a day for 50 consecutive days with a 50mm lens.  Furthermore, no tweaks or twiddles with Lightroom, Photoshop, NX2, Photomatix Pro, Hugin or anything else.  Images are straight from the camera.  OK, I'll shoot RAW so they'll be converted to JPEG, but other than that they're straight off the camera.

The body is a Nikon D300 and the lens is the 50mm f1.8.  All feedback good or bad is most welcome as is encouragement to keep going in order to complete the fifty shots!

So why a 50mm lens?  I suppose it's because rather more years ago than I care to remember my first decent SLR came with a pretty good 50mm f1.7 lens (in fact I still have the camera as you can see in the image to the left).  This 50mm lens was all I had, and I was shooting with Kodachrome 25 and Kodachrome 64 slide film. This meant I wasn't doing any cropping or darkroom dodging or twiddles.  At the time I can recall the pictures seemed fine.  Quite a few oohs and aahs when the images were projected on the screen.  Oh, and there was an interesting side effect.  I actually got to appreciate the camera and the lens; I got to know its strengths and weaknesses and could "see" the picture prior to bringing the camera to my eye.  Instead of being befuddled with numerous lenses from which to choose, I had no choice and had to make the 50mm lens work.  This meant moving my legs, changing angles and perspectives from which the shot was made rather then rotating a zoom ring.

So why now?  Well, there's another 50 in there as well.  It happens to be my age!  So, thirty years after my first attempt with a 50mm lens it's time to try again.  That's where the 505050 comes from.  50 shots in 50 days at 50 years of age.

Using the Nikon will be interesting as the focal length is a little longer than the 50mm on the Pentax due to the cropped sensor.  This time, in 35mm terms, I'll be using a 75mm lens.  This offers some interesting possibilities for short telephoto type shots and, of course, those with a shallow depth of field.

Please tag along as I take my shots and give feedback ... I'm certain I'll need a bit of encouragement as the days pass by :-)