I mentioned in another blog piece that I have two "home" focal lengths: 50mm and 35mm. These focal lengths give a field of view that I've been using for so long that I can visualise a frame with them before ever lifting the camera to my eye.
I've blogged previously about 50mm: I think it's about time I discussed my preferences in the 35mm realm.
The four lenses shown in the opening picture above are the four 35mm full-frame lenses that go from the present back to my earliest days in photography. They are (from newest to oldest) a Sony FE 35mm f/1.8, a Nikon 35mm f/2 AF-D, a Leica Summicron-M 35mm f/2 ASPH and an Olympus Zuiko 35mm f/2.8. I also have the Panasonic 15mm f/1.7 Leica DG Summilux ASPH MFT lens for my GX9: although close-ish in field of view, this is (a) not 35mm, and (b) not full frame, so I'm not including it in this discussion.
Sunroofs, Baltimore, Jan 1984. Olympus Zuiko 35mm f/2.8.
Bleriot monoplane, Woodchurch, 1997. Olympus Zuiko 35mm f/2.8.
I bought the Olympus lens in about 1981, second-hand for a price so inexpensive that even a student could afford it; I’ve forgotten how much it was (under £50 I think). It was my most used lens until I went digital in 2005. It came with me everywhere. I photographed travel, portraits, family snaps, and anything else that caught my eye, even aviation (mostly statics but nevertheless). I showed previously that, stopped down a little, it works beautifully on a digital full-frame sensor, and it is a pleasure to use even now.
Buskers and the ladies who lunch. Covent Garden, 2007. Leica Summicron-M 35mm f/2.
Bar Italia, Soho, 2008. Leica Summicron-M 35mm f/2. Still one of my favourite places to stop for coffee after more decades that I care to admit to!
The Summicron is a lens I was introduced to by my late friend Vasken, and it is wonderful in every respect. Of all the lenses mentioned here, this is the special one. It's tiny, built the way you would expect a Leica lens to be, and it renders pictures beautifully on film at every aperture (Ken Rockwell has an enthusiastic review). Unfortunately, as much as I would like to adapt it to my full-frame Sony cameras, there is a well-documented and fundamental incompatibility. The Leica lens was designed to put light directly onto film. The thick filter stack over a Sony sensor distorts the focus plane, meaning that the edges of the image become unusably smeared at most useful apertures. (This is not a criticism of Sony, just a statement of it-is-what-it-is.) It is possible to have Sony cameras adapted with an ultra-thin cover glass, but that complicates things. At this point, it's a film-only lens for me (on my M4) and, as much as I love it, I'm not shooting with film that much these days. Hmm ... I should do something about that!
Street tableau vivant, London, 2016. Nikon 35mm f/2 AF-D.
The Nikon 35mm f/2 AF-D lens was the first prime lens I bought for my original digital camera, a Nikon D70. The D70 was a crop sensor (APSC) camera and at the time I bought it, there was no APSC prime lens with a 50mm-equivalent field of view available. I bought this lens used from eBay intending to use it as a 50mm-ish lens, and also with the feeling that at such stage as I went full-frame, it would then serve as a native 35mm lens. That did indeed happen when I bought myself a D700 (also on the used market) in about 2011. One way and another, it is a lens I never really took to. It dates from the earliest days of Nikon’s autofocus technology meaning that the AF system is driven by a screw drive rather than having internal motors. Correspondingly, the focus is not particularly fast. On my D700 and D810 camera bodies, working with very transient street scenes, I used to get an awful lot of images that were not perfectly sharp. That was a bit of a shame because the images, especially in the centre, could be impressively sharp when correctly focused (although the edges at wider apertures were never that great). Nevertheless, it was small enough and light enough to be carried all day on the big, heavy full-frame DSLRs. (For some more example images, I used it extensively in my postcard from Berlin in 2016.) At present, I can't see myself using it much again, if at all.
[Parenthetically, it was the fact that I never enjoyed using the Nikon full-frame cameras with this 35mm lens was one of the factors that propelled me to go mirrorless with my Lumix GX9.]
Poster archeology in a shaft of light, London, 2023. Sony FE 35mm f/1.8 at f/4.
Antony Gormley’s Another Time XVI, cloudy day, April 2025. Sony FE 35mm f/1.8 at f/5.6.
When I bought my first Sony camera about four years ago, one of the first lenses I bought for it was the FE 35mm f/1.8. It's noticeably longer than any of the other lenses but it's still not particularly heavy, or large by today's standards. On a relatively lightweight Sony body, this is a lens that can easily be carried all day. Its autofocus is night and day faster than the old Nikon AF-D lens. It's also razor-sharp in the centre, and pretty sharp towards the edges (see LensTip’s evaluation), so I'm happy using it at any aperture. I've recently been taking it with me on one-camera-one-lens days walking in London, and it does very well.
What you'll notice is that with all these lenses, I've gone for the smallest, lightest lenses, mostly on the used market, that are moderately-to-cheaply priced. (Yes, "moderately" is a relative term in the Leica world, but bought used at 2008 prices, it was not too bad.) For my purposes, I've never been too fussed about getting the fastest or most glamorous lens. I'd love a Summilux (of course!) but I'm not sure it would do me that much good compared to the Summicron. My primary use-case for a 35mm lens is PBWA (photography by wandering around): the smallest, lightest practicable (inconspicuous, sharp, easy to use, reliable, fast AF) lens wins. Even so, the Sony f/1.4 GM lens keeps bobbing around in the back of my mind, but would I genuinely want to spend the day walking with something twice the weight? Light grasp is not the issue with modern digital cameras, so it is solely about the overall look and subject separation.
The Viltrox stand at the Photography Show, London, 2025. Viltrox 35mm f/1.2 at f/1.2.
Then again, I recently tried out the new Viltrox 35mm f/1.2 lens (demoed at the Photography Show in March). Things have moved on beyond imagining in terms of lens design and manufacturing. That lens is a knockout optically and quite reasonably priced: very sharp and with the ability to separate the subject from the background like nothing on earth. But for PBWA, it is a bit of a nonstarter for me. It's just too big and heavy. It's not a general-purpose lens for my taste, but it would be wonderful for some specialist applications.