groups

I didn't know anyone used fixed focus lenses any more! When I was using 35mm, my main Olympus lens was a 50mm 1.2, which had more damn glass than your average house! lol Whatever, I do like your picture, Stephanie.

Prime lenses are still the best, if you can afford to buy enough lenses to cover the whole range of what you shoot. That said, today's computer designed varifocal lenses are superb by comparison with years past.

They always want to sell you a 50mm prime lense; excuse me now everything is digital so they give you a zoom.
Your optimal lense size is 35mm; most digital cameras start with a 28mm zoom up to wherever, I forget.
Actually the best camera lenses these days are Panasonic since they are using German Leica lenses.
Anyway, nice shot

From what I read the 50 mm lens is closest to what the eye actually sees. Plus, I liked the sense of having to move my whole body to get the composition. With the zoom lens it is easy to become lazy, lol.

Moving around to find perspective is good.
I'm sorry to contradict but there is a reason, before digital, they called film 35mm. It is the optimum of what your eye really sees.
I think someone misinformed you about 50mm being the optimum.
It gets down to the 3x5 proportion of the picture.

@tjbr52:

1.] The acceptance & use of standardized 35mm film format stems has nothing to do with what the human eye can see. It stems directly from Thomas Edison's patent of his Kinetiphone in the early 1890's: Edison's aperture design defined a single frame of film at 4 perforations high. His film stock was manufactured by George Eastman (of Kodak fame), & distributed to Edison thru Blair Camera Co., where it was trimmed to Edison's specifications of 35mm, in order to fit the aperture & the sprockets designed to move the film forward. You can read about the history of 35mm in this Wikipedia article.

2.] Stephanie is correct about the 50mm lens most closely mimicking what the human eye sees. Its field of coverage (40° horizontally, 46° diagonally) is roughly equal to what the human eye can view with relative clarity.

Before the advent of digital SLRs, the 50 mm lens were considered prime, & was the traditional starter optic & mainstay lens for photographers. An excellent article about using them now -- view link

Here's the technical explanation of horizontal planes of view, human eye compared to 50mm lens. Interestingly, this is from legal records thru the EFSEC of the State of Washington. view link "Field of View - Horizontal Plane
For evolutionary reasons, the extreme perimeter of human vision is really only for sensing motion and large-scale objects (e.g., the lion suddenly approaching you from the side).

The central angle of view is approximately 40-60 degrees directly in front of the eyes and is what most influences human perception of a scene, as shown in Figure 2. Subjectively, this would roughly correspond with the angle over which a viewer could recall objects
from a scene if he/she had kept their eyes in the same position (Forum 2008).

A 35 mm camera equipped with a 50 mm lens takes a +/- 45 degree field of view in the horizontal plane and best represents and records the central angle within the normal human field of view (Nikon 2008).

Figure 2 illustrates the typical field of view that wide angle, normal, and telephoto lenses capture. The field of view captured by the 50 mm lens is 45 degrees and has the closest relationship to the central angle of the human field of view, without distortion of the object's
scale in the captured scene (Smardon et al. 1986)."

Wow! That's a lot of good information! I hope I get a chance to work with it some more this weekend.

In this shot of gourds, the first shot was taken with my kit zoom lens and the second shot was taken with the 50 mm.

Steph,
Come on, tell the truth. You really artfully arranged the vines up there on the urn, then, when you were quite satisfied they were in their proper place, you glued them in with white glue. I know your ways. (just kidding) A fine shot, well composed, showing how nature can impose its will over man made objects. If it was banyan tree roots over a face of the Buddha in Ankor Watt it wouldn't be much better. I liked it alot.

Thank you Misterreal

You're going to have a lot of fun with that 50mm :-) It's experiencing somewhat of a resurgence these days. There's even a challenge on one of my favorite photo sites of using *only* the 50mm to shoot anything & everything -- just imagine the various fascinating outcomes.

I hope you do get to read the article by Gary Voth about the "forgotten" lens :-) It's pretty inspiring!

Did you know that some photographers reverse-mount their 50mm to achieve macro photography? Is that cool, or what? Here's another great article about them at Digital Photography School - view link There's some really excellent, basic, easy-to-understand info there.