One really fun thing about the Konica SLR system is how dirt cheap it is on the used market. I’ve been able to put together a pretty comprehensive collection of bodies and lenses for very little–probably for 1/4 the price of a comparable Pentax system, for example. This has given me a chance to try out a variety of focal lengths, and really get my head around what kind of imagery each one can produce.
A bit of history here:
The first 35mm camera, the Leica (often called the “ur Leica“) was designed around an available parts bin. Oskar Bernack designed it to use readily available 35mm cinema film and Leitz cine optics. There’s a lot of speculation that he chose the 50mm focal length for his camera because that’s what was lying around. (The more common explanation is that he chose 50mm because it produced an angle of view that was closest to what the human eye sees. But I prefer the former explanation–that his 50mm was a lens of convenience.)
Bernack was working at a time–just before and just after the First World War–when optics precision was improving very quickly, and it was finally possible to get a very sharp image on a comparatively small negative. That’s what made his camera such a compelling design: you could get gallery-quality images using a machine that fit into your shirt pocket.
Along with the first 35mm cameras came a new photographic language. Their small size and high precision allowed a much more fluid use. Cameras came out of the studios, off the tripods. and out into the street, allowing a new, immediate, environmental photojournalism and images capturing “the decisive moment.”
I’m not sure that Bernack anticipated interchangeable lenses with the first Leica, but other 35mm cameras entered the marketplace over the next decade–including the much more complicated Contax, and Kodak’s Retina series–and with them came the concept of interchangeable lenses. 50mm remained the “default” focal length, but other standard sizes soon emerged: 35mm for “wide angle” shots, 135mm for long shots, and 85mm for portraits.
There were two problems to overcome: how to aim and frame the image–i.e., how to know which portion of the scene you’re shooting will end up on the film–and how to focus the lens.
The ur-Leica didn’t have an optical viewfinder; it had a separate crosshairs target frame mounted to the top of the camera. A viewfinder was developed for later versions of his camera. This allowed you to peer through and get a rough idea of what would show up on film with a 50mm lens.
Lenses with different focal lengths required different viewfinders. If you wanted to switch to, say, an 85mm lens, you’d have to mount an 85mm viewfinder on top of the camera, and use that to frame your image, instead of the built-in 50mm viewfinder.
The lenses at this time were precise, but they were “slow:” they had a small aperture. You could only use them in brightly lit situations, because they only allowed in so much light. Faster lenses allowing use in low light and indoors–with much larger, even more precise glass elements–came later.
Focusing wasn’t much a problem with slow 50mm lenses, or with wide-angle lenses. With these early cameras and lenses, you estimated how far away your subject was, and adjusted the lens focus using a distance scale etched on the side of the lens barrel. The small aperture meant that there was a lot of depth of field–more of the foreground and the background was in acceptable focus–so slight errors in focus weren’t a big problem.
But focusing was more critical with faster lenses, and with long focal length lenses, because of their shallower depth of field. Because of the wide iris of a faster lens, much less of the space in front of and behind the subject was acceptably sharp, and focusing at wide apertures had to be more precise.
The first solution was to use a separate rangefinder device, often mounted onto the top of the camera. Use the rangefinder to determine the distance from the camera to the subject, and then focus the lens by turning the lens barrel to the corresponding distance index mark.
Soon a rangefinder was incorporated into the camera itself, and attached (or “coupled”) to the focusing mechanism of the lens. The Leica II and the watchlike Contax I were among the first to incorporate a coupled rangefinder. But the viewfinder and the rangefinder were still separate devices: you looked through the rangefinder window to focus the image, and through the viewfinder window to frame the shot.
(Decent scale-focusing 35mm cameras persisted into the 1980s. Small-aperture lenses worked just fine for travel photography, and didn’t need precise focusing. You could get away without a rangefinder for this kind of photography.)
As these cameras evolved, and as it became clearer to the camera designers what 35mm cameras were being used for, lens focal lengths became somewhat standardized. 50mm endured as the “standard” focal length–partially because the angle of view is closest to what the naked eye sees, partially as a legacy carried over from the first Leitz camera.
35mm was a good wide angle lens, good for taking in entire scenes: street scenes, landscapes, etc. And lens speed for a wide-angle lens wasn’t critical, because generally you’d want everything in your scene in focus anyway. (Faster 35mm lenses came later.)
85mm was a good focal length for portraits: it produced flattering results, and even a moderately large aperture helped blur the background a bit, to provide more emphasis on the person being photographed.
135mm was the longest practical focal length for a rangefinder camera. Anything longer would be difficult to focus–even with the aid of a rangefinder–and particularly difficult to frame through a separate viewfinder/rangefinder mechanism. But 135mm is kind of a funny focal length: too long for decent portrait taking, not long enough for birdwatching or other wildlife photography.
The next step was to incorporate viewfinder framelines into the camera that corresponded to the most popular lenses available. What you saw through the viewfinder was the same regardless of the focal length of the lens you were using, but the field of view for each lens was defined by a small rectangle superimposed in the viewfinder. A wide-angle frameline was almost as big as the viewfinder’s field of view, while a 135mm frameline showed up as a tiny rectangle in the middle of the viewfinder. (”Odd” focal lengths still required separate viewfinders, which were usually packaged with the corresponding lens.)
Then came SLRs, and camera manufacturers and lens designers were no longer restricted to these four standard focal lengths. But 50mm persisted as a “standard” focal length even into the SLR era. The Yen was cheap, the design and manufacturing expertise was extraordinary, and the sheer volume of production allowed for massive economies of scale. Each manufacturer offered different grades of 50mm lens: a “kit” lens with a f2.0 or f1.7 maximum aperture, a faster upgrade lens (usually f1.4) and a super fast, super expensive option (f1.2).
These four focal lengths–35mm, 50mm, 85mm, and 135mm–persisted as “standards” long after they needed to, long after designers were no longer restricted by standardized framelines or external viewfinders. And then things evolved some more: soon 28mm became a favored wide-angle focal length–still comparatively slow–and supplanted 35mm as a wide angle of choice. And as a new generation of compact 35mm SLRs came out starting in the mid 1970s, 40mm became a new “standard” kit lens length, because it could be made physically smaller than 50mm.
Why do I bring this up? Because I’ve been toying with a 35mm Konica lens lately, and find the experience different than 28mm. And in a funny way it feels like a step back in time.
