Nomenclature

[Killtimer]

Specifically the term "prime". I'm just getting back into serious photography after a very long hiatus... my last serious cameras were a Linhoff and a 'Blad, so a long time.
I'm delving into photography social media a bit and I've noticed that anything not a zoom is now called a prime. I always thought a prime lens was one that approximated the FOV of the human eye. Anything else was a telephoto, wide angle or zoom. I'm just curious when this changed, not that I'm surprised, most everything else has also changed.

 

[Unframed Dave]

I've always considered a fixed focal a prime, not based on anything, just a perception.

 

[iamdlewis]

I seem to remember in high school way back in the time before digital that we had prime and zoom lens. You would have a wide angle prime which was something less than 50mm, a wide angle zoom which was something that started wider than 50mm and it really didn't matter what the longest was. I am not sure what we considered telephoto because nobody had anything longer than a 75mm.

So I've pretty much always known fixed lengthens as Prime and anything with adjustable lengthens as zooms with a descriptor before of wide, standard or telephoto. Though I don't really know where telephoto starts or where wide ends. I feel that wide is <35mm with standard being 35-100 and telephoto >100.

 

[Killtimer]

I'm beginning to feel really old. Let me put it this way. I got out of the business just as digital was dawning, and I mean scanner based AV stuff, the consumer digital camera was still a dream. At that time not one of the majors, Canon, Nikon, Leica etc. even made a pro-grade zoom so the zoom/fixed focal length thing didn't really exist. In 25 years in business I only had a single zoom that I can remember... Actually might still have it along with a dozen or so Canon FD lenses in a box in the basement.

 

[Landshark99]

early on zooms were inferior to prime lenses, but there were a number of pro quality zooms available before the digital revolution, by the major camera companies

 

[Killtimer]

were a number of pro quality zooms available before the digital revolution, by the major camera companies

I guess we'll have to agree to disagree on that. The first zoom that had anywhere near the resolution and contrast that would be useful was Vivitar. I know Canon had nothing and many of my contemporaries were Nikon users. There were many discussions on the relative merits of each, but I can't ever recall zooms being discussed. I will admit that 35mm was only about 10% of my shooting but I was an accredited Canon user and had access to their complete product line through the local service centre. I was out of the game by the '90s so no idea what happened after that.

 

[Landshark99]

Sorry but my memory is different than yours, in the early and mid seventies while trying to get my professional career started I managed one of the most important camera stores in Hollywood selling mostly to working pros of all styles. Quite a number of news and sport photographers bought those early zooms from Nikon and Canon. Funny you should mention the Vivitar because i was the main photo assistant on a Vivitar campaign. When I left the store and was shooting full time, I used only primes on my Nikons and Hasselblad(a camera which I hated), as I moved more heavily into medium format I shot only with primes on one my all time favorite workhorse camera, the Mamiya RZ67. At some point still before digital i switched to Canon for the occasional 35mm work and used both zoom and primes for those jobs. When digital arrived in the DSLR type cameras it became almost exclusively zooms plus maybe a 300mm. The main digital from this time was first Contax, only primes, Hassleblad primes, Leaf big zoom, back to Hasselblad and finally Phase One, along with switching back to Nikon for full frame only zooms and a 300F2,8, Now retired shooting Sony with primes and zooms just for me

 

[FowlersFreeTime]

Specifically the term "prime". I'm just getting back into serious photography after a very long hiatus... my last serious cameras were a Linhoff and a 'Blad, so a long time.
I'm delving into photography social media a bit and I've noticed that anything not a zoom is now called a prime. I always thought a prime lens was one that approximated the FOV of the human eye. Anything else was a telephoto, wide angle or zoom. I'm just curious when this changed, not that I'm surprised, most everything else has also changed.

I'm "new" to photography since beginning with an a6000 5 yrs ago. I have always heard of non-zoom lenses referred to as primes, so that's the nomenclature I know and accept.
I can only guess that "back in the day" "standard primes" were around 50mm, "wide prime" would be 35mm, and anything else would be unusual to encounter. Maybe I'm wrong but it seems to me that nowadays there's more prime (non-zoom) lenses to choose from than ever before.

 

[Killtimer]

I used only primes on my Nikons and Hasselblad(a camera which I hated), as I moved more heavily into medium format I shot only with primes on one my all time favorite workhorse camera, the Mamiya RZ67. At some point still before digital i switched to Canon for the occasional 35mm work and used both zoom and primes for those jobs.

This has turned into a bit of a memory jogger. Same basic timeline very different progression in a totally different market. The first camera I used to make money was a Mamiya RB67 (Rotating Back) Awesome portrait/wedding system, but cumbersome on location. Then Mamiya 645, 'Blad and ended up doing mostly product and architectural with a variety of 4x5 full movement. No idea why I kept most of the 35mm when I sold the operation in the late 80s. Dug them up yesterday and will confess there are a pair of zooms in the box. A Vivitar 75-205 Macro that weighs as much as my a6700 and most lenses, and a Carl Zeiss Jena 35-135. I think some lens test are in order. Fun discussion.

 

[Landshark99]

I worked mostly in Entertainment Advertising and Publicity, Ads for TV shows and Movies, Posters, Billboards, Magazine images. A lot of studio and location work with actors, with projects that kept getting bigger and bigger over the years, by the time I retired my usual crew was three to five assistants, and a huge light and grip package. In the beginning it was almost all Nikon with 24, 35, 50 105 and a 180 shooting Kodachrome of actors and celebrities for the ads and such. I switched to Fujichrome and the RZ as soon as they saw how much better the larger format could do. Along the way I also played with 4X5 and 8X10(which I loved), the 35 mm stuff was now being used for more extreme location stuff or images that required more action from the subjects, this is where the zooms started to come in. My other favorite medium format was the Fuji GX 680 III if you owned it, rentals were not as dependable. For work the only 6X4.5 I got into was the Contax because we shot both digital and some film with that camera. After some 50 years I retired and now just shoot for me.
I now own more lenses in general for my two Sonys than I did when I was working 6 primes and 4 zooms.
But back to the original question on terms, working with the film industry I remember all fixed lenses being called primes and zooms were either parfocal (stays in focus as it is zoomed) or varifocal (focus moves as lens is zoomed), as to more specific prime or fixed focal length terms, for me there was fisheye, super wide, wide, normal, macro, short portrait or short telephoto, medium and long telephoto. If they had a large aperture they added fast to the to the name, ie my 35mm F1.4 was a fast wide.

 

[Killtimer]

Yeah, definitely different markets. I went from resource based corporate annual report work to food, mostly location stuff. Primarily a 1 man band unless I needed 16 mm stuff, which one client needed for archival reasons. Ended up doing a lot of cookbooks. Just for grins, here's a grab of one of my location shoots.

 

[Landshark99]

for context this is an image of some shoot set up from the past in a studio

• GR
• GR LENS
• 18.3 mm
• ƒ/2.8
• 10/1000 sec
• ISO 1600

 

[Killtimer]

↑ That is a dream setup.

 

[AlphaWorld]

Specifically the term "prime". I'm just getting back into serious photography after a very long hiatus... my last serious cameras were a Linhoff and a 'Blad, so a long time.
I'm delving into photography social media a bit and I've noticed that anything not a zoom is now called a prime. I always thought a prime lens was one that approximated the FOV of the human eye. Anything else was a telephoto, wide angle or zoom. I'm just curious when this changed, not that I'm surprised, most everything else has also changed.

No, the term for a lens that approximates the field of view of the human eye is (and has been while I've been taking photographs) a "standard" lens. You can get "standard zoom" lenses (typically applied to a 24-70), too. A standard prime (on a full-frame 35mm camera) is typically a 45mm, but the term is usually used for 50mm as well.

Wider than standard is generally called wideangle.

Narrower than standard is most often called "telephoto", although technically that's not correct (I'm sure someone has already chimed in on that point).

But perhaps the most important point of all: social media (photographic or otherwise) is a hotbed of wrong information. Just because someone posted something on Facebook or made a YouTube video about it does not make it fact (arguably, the probability is that it's wrong ).

 

[AlphaWorld]

One other point:

We generally use the term "prime" for a lens with a fixed focal length. I was just reminded that "fixed" is also used for cameras which do not have interchangeable lenses - people refer to a "fixed 43mm lens" (context: Leica Q3 43). So if we want to avoid the term prime, we must remember to qualify "fixed" with "focal length"