Why 40mm?

By Mike Johnston

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Forty millimeters has long been my favorite focal length for 35mm cameras. I got "turned on" to the focal length when I interviewed Sally Mann (right, by Molly Roberts) for Camera & Darkroom magazine in the 1980s. She told me she had supported her artwork in the early days by doing lots of small freelance jobs, including many for the local military academy. She used Olympus OM cameras, and she said that if she were going to do any artwork in 35mm she would use the 40mm ƒ/2 Zuiko. We talked about the focal length for a while, but all I remember now is Sally saying that 40mm is "about right." That's what started my interest in 40mms.

A few years later, looking for a "Leica with AE," I became aware of the Minolta CLE. It, too, had a 40mm normal lens—the Minolta 40mm ƒ/2 M-Rokkor. This turned out to be one of the best lenses I've ever used, fantastically sharp and smooth. My friend John Kennerdell, a photographer who lived in Bangkok at the time, told me that one Japanese connoisseur had dubbed it "the Water Lens." Curiously, it was one of the only lenses I've ever used that consistently drew positive comments about sharpness and clarity from non-photographers looking at my prints.

The latest addition to the short list is of course the Cosina/Voigtländer 40mm ƒ/1.4 Nokton, the first lens of its specification ever. It can be extremely sharp and contrasty when shown off at its best, and for a fast lens it has pretty good bokeh—a term that just refers to the appearance of the out-of-d.o.f. blur, whatever you may have read elsewhere!

I've found as a general rule that bokeh gets progressively more problematic: a) the larger the aperture, b) the closer the focus, c) the more distant the background, and d) the more contrasty the background. With any lens, we discover our own limits for what we'll tolerate, and then shoot within those limits. For instance, with the 4th-version 35mm Summicron (pre-ASPH), I would never shoot wide open because the contrast was just too low for me (and sometimes the vignetting was objectionable, too). Overall, the more shots I've seen taken with the 40mm Nokton Classic, the more serviceable it seems. If you keep the plane of focus reasonably distant and watch the background, even ƒ/1.4 seems usable in point of vignetting, contrast, and center sharpness. Not a bad result at all for a small, fast lens.

Richard Sintchak, Ben and Amy at the Counter, 40mm Nokton S.C. (single-coated)

Of course, no focal length is magic. Many photographers have different favorites. As long as they're in the right hands, most common focal lengths can be used to make pictures that are excellent. So why 40mm? I'd say that the 40mm focal length is special precisely because it's not special. Purely by convention, 50mm has long been considered the "normal" focal length for 35mm photography. Early WA's were 35mm. Many photographers have made a choice between these two focal lengths as their own "normals." Many, like myself, have switched back and forth. The truth is, neither of these common focal lengths are quite "normal" for 35mm. 50mm is just a touch long, and 35mm is just a touch wide. Using the diagonal of the format as the standard, the true normal would be about 42mm (curiously, that's about exactly a 28mm lens on an APS-C digital sensor, although no cameramakers who mainly make APS-C cameras have come out with dedicated 28mm normals for the format). The various oddball "intermediate" focal lengths (38mm, 40mm, 43mm, and 45mm), although much less common, are actually closer to a true normal for the 35mm format.

Why would you want a lens to be "normal," anyway? So what's so special about not being special? Glad you asked.

Taken by Richard Sintchak with a Voigtländer Bessa R3A and 40mm Nokton S.C. on Tri-X.

Getting Past It
These days, we're witnessing an intense interest in digital cameras in online forums. The nexus of this interest, however, is almost always technological, not visual. People want to know about pixel count, bit depth, noise at high ISOs, turn-on time, how many microns each photosite measures, what the buffer speed is, and so forth. This is actually quite typical. Photography has always had a technological side that is endlessly fascinating, and this is as true of digital as it is of traditional photography. What it means is that we photographers often approach photography as if its main interest were technical and technological. We don't look so much at the visual content and the visual effects of pictures as we do their technical properties.

But many of the greatest photographers have "gotten past" the technical aspect of the craft. What I mean by that is that they choose a particular mode of operation, a way of working, and then they concentrate on the visual aspect of the pictures. Think of it. The late Henri Cartier-Bresson was indelibly associated with Leicas and the 50mm lens. Edward Weston made 8x10 contact prints. Eugene Atget and August Sander used more or less the same techniques for most of their important work. Nicholas Nixon and Shelby Lee Adams use large-format cameras with wide-angle lenses to photograph people. We associate Ernst Haas with 35mm Kodachrome, Eliot Porter with the dye transfer process. The point is, these photographers and many other like them don't want you to look at their pictures from a technical perspective. They've chosen the technical properties they like, granted, but they understand that those technical properties are not what make any particular picture good or not-so-good. You don't look at a Cartier-Bresson picture and say, "Gee, look at how sharp that Leica 50mm lens is." You don't look at a Weston and say, "Wow, 8x10 gives you such smooth tonality." The reason you don't is that all Cartier-Bressons were taken with sharp 50s, and all Westons have smooth tonality. It's not that these photographs don't have technical properties, it's that the artists want you to get past that, and look at the subject, the visual content, and the meaning of their photographs.

Illustrations © 2005 by Richard Sintchak

Focal lengths, too, impart specialized properties to pictures. You can zoom way in on something that's far off, get so close to something that it looks almost abstract, or use a lens so wide that distortion is part of the "visual toolkit" you're working with. And there's nothing at all wrong with any of this! I'm not arguing against technical experimentation or wildly unusual focal lengths. What I'm saying is that if you're concerned with extremist focal lengths, then your pictures will display certain properties associated with those focal lengths, and people are more likely to see those properties when they come to your pictures. I came across a delightful set of pictures recently by a young Japanese photographer who had bought himself a Bessa R2 and a 15mm Voigtländer lens. He was clearly having an enormous amount of fun experimenting with what the lens could do—you could just sense his enthusiasm and playfulness from his pictures. But of course many of the pictures deliberately exhibited the properties not so much of the real world as seen by the photographer, but of the real world as seen by the lens.

Moderate focal lengths, to my eye at least, serve in part to remove this sort of "specialness" from pictures. They make the angle-of-view and the type of distortion nondescript. And what this allows, in turn, is a concentration on the visual content of pictures. That's what's so special about not being special.

As the tribe of photographers has gotten much larger, it's become more popular to say things like "40mm is the most boring focal length." But turn that around. Isn't that person saying that the pictures he makes with that focal length are boring? Meaning, he can't make an interesting picture without a more extreme focal length lens? Careful with those epithets, pardner.

So is a 40mm "better" than a 35mm or a 50mm, or any other focal length you like? Of course not. Good artists can "normalize" any way (or many ways) of seeing. Ernst Haas used the very slow (ASA 10) speed of early Kodachrome to explore motion blur. Ralph Gibson uses high contrast to make pictures less atmospheric and more graphic. But if you care to remove obvious focal-length effects from your pictures, and "get past" those properties, so that you and the viewers of your pictures concentrate on what you're looking at, how you see as opposed to how the lens sees, then the 40mm true normal might be, as Sally Mann said to me, about right.

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Originally published on The Luminous Landscape. Copyright 2005, 2008 by Michael C. Johnston, All Rights Reserved.

Comments

[Phil]

I know exactly what you mean. Except, for me it's a 35mm focal length. I've always been a bit of a wide-angle guy so I guess my "normal" is just a bit wide. The problem is, I haven't had a decent 35mm(equivalent) for a long time, ever since my bag with Pentax LX and handful of lenses was stolen about 10 years ago.

Oh, I've had good lenses since. Right now I'm shooting an E-1 and Zuiko-Digital 14-54 and it's certainly really good but I find that, it being a zoom, I'm always zooming around looking for that sweet spot and then realizing that if I'd just left that lens at the 18mm mark, I would have saved myself some bother and taken more, better pictures. And so that SMC-Takumar 35mm f.2 (and the LX that went with it) keeps coming back to remind me that, while there's nothing wrong with experimenting with different gear (in fact, I'm all for that), always keep on hand your basic "normal" setup because that's what you'll probably end up coming back to in the end.
Cheers
Phil.

[Jeff Naughton]

I carried a Rollei 35 in a belt pack for about twenty-five years. 40mm f3.5. It took about a month for me to realize I was never going to take out the Nikkormat with a 50mm on it as long as I had the Rollei 35 with me. But I did frequently wish it was a 35mm!

Non-photographers invariably remarked on how "sharp" or "realistic" the pictures were--this was obvious even on 4x6 prints. The only other lens that garnered equivalent praise was/is my Canon 85mm f1.8.

[Ken Tanaka]

Mike: I'm so glad to find someone else that acknowledges, and likes, a 40mm focal length. I had picked up that irresistible, relatively inexpensive Voigtländer 40mm ƒ/1.4 Nokton form my M7 and M8 bodies on a lark early this year. It's a wonderfully sharp lens with very good contrast and not prone to flares or blowing highlights.

But I cannot actually claim it to be my "favorite" focal length lens for two reasons. First, and perhaps most practically, there are no 40mm framelines on my Ms. (Gee, I wonder why rangefinders were pushed to near extinction.) So I have to guesstimate my image frame as an expansion from the 50mm framelines that the lens sets in these cameras.

Second, at least on the M8's cropped-sensor, 40mm is too narrow to be wide and does not feature that wonderful slight telephoto compression of a 50mm.

Consequently I don't find myself grabbing for the 40mm as frequently as I do my 50mm, 35mm, and 28mm lenses. Last spring, however, I found myself with only the 40mm for an entire day. Honestly, it was fine. I just got into the groove and played to its strengths whenever possible.

Thanks for this wonderful essay, Mike.

[Ray Bullen]

Like Jeff, I used to use a Rollei 35 with a splendid 40mm lens, and I never gave a fig that it didn't have a zoom lens. Also, if I could only have one of the lenses I use on my Pentax *ist DL it would be my old Vivitar 28mm I think. Mind you, that's probably as much to do with the rather soft character of the lens, which I like, as the focal length.

[H&U]

You seem to have forgotten a famous ~40 mm lens. The Pentax SMC-FA 43mm F 1.9 Limited and its natural perspective of subjects.

[Jeff Montgomery]

When I graduated HS I sold my beloved K1000 and bought the new Canon T-90. The only lens I could afford was the 50mm kit lens. I photographed my freshman year of college for the Yearbook and I shot Everything with that 50mm 1.8. I mean group photos of 75 people to football games at the intramural fields. I got more lenses and I use zooms today but I learned more about being a photographer in that one year with my one 50mm lens. My other favorite film camera these days is my old Olympus Stylus Epic with the 35mm F2.8.

[Dave Sailer]

When I bought a Pentax 67 a few years back I got three lenses, 45mm, 90mm, and 200mm. About two thirds of what I shot was with the 90, and most of the rest with the 45, with the 200 coming in a very distant third. The 90, in 35mm terms, would be around 43mm. It annoyed me. Not long enough to isolate a subject and not short enough to show context, but in the end those qualities turned out to be right most of the time. It was only my imagination that was lacking, and my skill. I'm still waiting for for a small, flexible, responsive, simple and manually controllable digital camera and could live with a single focal length. As soon as I can afford to buy something again. Some day. (Note on simple: look at the top view of the new Leica S2.)

[Lars K. Christensen]

For those who want an aprox. 40 mm equivalent for the APS-C sensor, I would recommend having a look at the Sigma 28/1.8 aspherical. More info on http://blog.christianehoej.dk/2007/10/15/sigma-2818-asph-ii/langswitch_lang/en/

[Stephen Lewis]

My favorite cameras, for serious work and for informal strolls, are fixed lens Rolleiflex twin-lens cameras. I own three -- an 80mm 2.8 Xenotar, an 80mm 2.8 Planar, and a 75mm 3.5 Tessar. The Tessar model, flimsier-built, lighter, and with an archaic lens design, provided me with most of my more memorable results. Why? I am convinced that this is because 75mm on 6x6cm film is a tad wider than "normal," thus adding a drop of wide-angle-like tension to each image and greater surroundings in environmental portraits and interiors. 40mm sounds fine to me thus!

[Mike J.]

"The Tessar model, flimsier-built, lighter, and with an archaic lens design, provided me with most of my more memorable results. Why? I am convinced that this is because 75mm on 6x6cm film is a tad wider than "normal," thus adding a drop of wide-angle-like tension to each image and greater surroundings in environmental portraits and interiors."

Stephen,
Possibly also because the Tessar is a nicer-looking lens, even though it's not as good.

Mike J.

[Harold Glit]

Mike
great article. As you, I have always been going back and forth between the 35 and 50mm (with a marked preference for the former) and think a 40mm would replace both in most cases.

On that subject, it would be interesting to have your informed opinion about the single and the multicoated versions, especially the difference in the visual properties and why one should choose one versus another.

I am looking forward to the new 20mm f/1.7 (40mm in 35mm equivalent)on the new Olympus Micro 4/3.

Harold Glit

[Mike J.]

"On that subject, it would be interesting to have your informed opinion about the single and the multicoated versions, especially the difference in the visual properties and why one should choose one versus another."

Hi Harold,
I haven't compared them.

The choice stems from the fact that some Japanese optical connoisseurs are or were of the belief that a slight amount of veiling glare created by less efficient coating actually helped to reinforce the shadow tones when using B&W film, similar to the way that pre-flashing the film does. I don't know whether this is something that can be demonstrated on the two Voigtlander 50s or not.

Mike J.

[Larry Miller]

Personally I love the Voigtlander 40/F2 Ultron. It's sleek, it's sharp and looks great on my F2 or F3. The 50mm just seems too confining to me, where the 40mm offers a little bit more room.

[Eric Chi]

Great article! Learn a lot from it.

[Dror Yosef]

The article is well written and very interesting, thank you!

[BxG]

It's midway through 2021 and I just found this article. I'm about to embark on a 6 month project using a Fujifilm X-E3 and an adapted manual focus C/Y 28mm f/2.8 lens. The X-E3 is setup to use a film 'recipe' for Agfa Scala B&W. This recipe is courtesy of Ritchie Roesch at https://fujixweekly.com (credit where credit is due.) The C/Y 28mm should give me right around 42mm of view. This is a getting out of my comfort zone experiment to bring meaning back to what my photography is, rather than what I use to make it. I'm hoping it will be both fun and enlightening. The title I had planned for the project is '42.' It's what prompted me to search the web for 42mm photography in the first place.