In the beginning of digital photography I shot mostly zooms. I thought fixed focal length photography was pretentious snobbery. Selecting a set of lenses, lugging them around and constantly changing them. Who has time for that?

Around flickr's prime I decided to write a little script that analyzed the EXIF of my photo catalog for actually used focal lengths and lo and behold they were pretty much centered around 50 mm. The fall-off to wider angles was pretty steep but for the longer focal lengths it only was pronounced after around 80 mm.

So, I got my self a fast nifty-fifty and I shoot it on APS-C (~80 mm) and full frame (50 mm) since. It is not quite telephoto territory but I'd say it gives you a result distinctly different from smartphone photography, especially the 80 mm.

> I thought fixed focal length photography was pretentious snobbery.

35mm (50mm on ASP-C) was faster (f1.8) and smaller and sharper than 18-55mm f3.5-5.6 kit zoom.

And then 85mm (130mm on ASP-C, f2.8) wasn't much bigger.

I have used this tool to run the same analysis with Lightroom:

https://www.lightroomdashboard.com/

(Turns out I love 35mm on my Fujis)

This is funny, at one point I became convinced 50mm is too "boring" of a focal length, and almost sold mine. Then I realised some of my best shots were taken at 50mm. It's a good neutral perspective when the scene is already composed well as seen by the eye's perspective (approximately).

>> I thought fixed focal length photography was pretentious snobbery

Ask any Leica M users (both film and digital). Normally they only use primes to achieve compact setup. Any Leica user is automatically a snob, right?

Joking aside, I have nothing against zoom. For travelling, usually I don't need anything beside 24-70. Not a really compact setup, obviously, so need to downsize the image sensor. On APSC it would be 16-55. Or on MFT, it would be... hmm 12-40?