Good Gear That Rests Too Much

I have a lot of camera gear.  There's nothing I'd part with but the fact is that some of it gets out a lot and some of it doesn't.  So I decided to give myself a little assignment to put some of it to use.  Here's the first of a short series of images gathered.

This photo was taken using my Canon 5D2 camera fitted with the Canon 40mm f2.8 lens.  The 5D2 is a great camera; I've taken loads of great photos with it.  It is now my spare and I would not part with it for a variety of reasons.

A preferred fixed focal length lens for photo journalists using range finder cameras in the 1950s and 1960s was 35mm.  It provided a wider field of view than a 50mm lens (the lens most often thought of as 'normal' on a 35mm camera) without any eye-catching distortion.  The Canon 40mm lens was introduced a couple of years ago and when attached to a full frame digital camera body it yields images of comparable focal length to the 35mm lens on a rangefinder camera .  A unique feature of the 40mm lens is that it is really small; when attached to the camera body it projects just 1" making it a very discrete lens that takes up almost no room at all in the camera bag.  They are inexpensive lenses coming in around $230.  It's a fairly fast lens too at f2.8.

When I bought this lens I thought I'd use it a lot.  It's not the sharpest lens in the world but that's OK.