I love shooting with a fixed, prime lens on my cameras. My preferred focal length is a 50mm lens. With a 50mm lens and a full frame camera, it feels just extremely natural. Just like the field of view with my own eyes.
So the people, places and things in my photographs look the same as my eyes see them. If my photo is close to the subject, it is because I am that close. You can get a sense of where I am actually standing in every photograph.
That is a powerful notion in my mind.
That idea of “where I stand” is going to get even more interesting.
I am super excited about virtual reality and how that will change how we capture, create and share our photographs and videos in the future.
Flickr recently showed off a demo of an immersive experience with an Oculus DK2. And there will be plenty of others apps on Oculus. With VR, we will be able to fully & completely experience and re-live moments as if we were really there — in every sense. Look up, look around, it’s all there.
So while a 50mm lens may be a forever sentimental classic, I’m having goosebumps thinking about photography + Oculus.
My partner Santo wrote this at the time of the first investment in Oculus a few years back.
It [Oculus Rift} was an amazing transformational experience. For the next 10 minutes I could not find anything more intelligent to say than ‘wow’.
I couldn’t agree more.