3 hours ago
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Forced to sell every camera and lens and shoot a single focal length forever, plenty of street shooters would reach for 35mm because it handles almost anything. There's a strong case that the wider 28mm produces more interesting pictures, and the reasoning has less to do with sharpness and more to do with truth.
Mike Chudley makes that case by walking through his own work, and he starts by defending the option he didn't pick. Chudley calls 35mm clean, neat, and tidy, a focal length you can carry into a portrait, a street scene, a landscape, or a plate of food and walk away fine. That word "fine" is where his argument turns. If you're choosing one perspective for the rest of your life, he treats "fine" as a low ceiling and 28mm as the more interesting bet. He shoots almost everything on a Leica MP with a 28mm Elmarit, switching to a 35mm Summilux only when he needs the extra stops, as he did shooting at night on Coney Island.
The core idea is that 28mm is the widest you can go before an image stops looking like real life. Go to 24, 21, or 16mm and buildings lean, faces stretch at the edges, and the lens itself becomes the subject. Chudley wants the photograph to be interesting without the glass being the interesting thing, so 28mm sits at the limit where a picture still reads as someone who stood there, saw something, and pressed the shutter. He calls it a truthful focal length, and he extends that logic to the long end too, arguing a 200mm compression is no more honest than an ultra-wide because nobody sees the world that way. The stronger point comes from what he used to hate: the hand, the extra face, the tree branch, the bin that sneaks into a 28mm frame. He once read those as sloppy composition and now treats them as evidence of a candid moment.
His examples earn the argument. Two horses in the Tibetan mountains work because you can see the tail of one and not the other, a puzzle-piece effect he couldn't have kept on a 35mm with his back against a wall. Three men crossing a London street work because the space around them tells you how much room they had to breathe. A man fighting an umbrella in a Brighton wind tunnel works because 28mm caught a sleeve that looked like a third arm, a detail Chudley admits he didn't notice until later. He's honest about the downsides too. A boring scene at 28mm is worse than a boring scene at 35mm, since all that extra frame fills with empty sky or pavement, and location matters. London's layered streets suit it; a quiet rural village leaves you shooting a lot of nothing.
If you want to steal one principle here, it's the crop cushion that a wide lens gives you and why it's quietly reshaping how a lot of people work. Chudley leans on the fact that you can crop into a 28mm frame later but you can't ever uncrop a 35mm shot. Leica built that philosophy into hardware. The Leica Q2 and the current Leica Q3 pair a fixed 28mm lens with 35mm and 50mm crop frame lines built into the finder, and the Q3's 60-megapixel sensor gives those crops real resolution to spare. Shoot wide, decide the tighter composition in post, keep the option open. That approach fits documentary and street work where you can't predict what walks into the frame, and it pairs neatly with the Gary Winogrand line Chudley quotes: "I photograph to find out what something will look like photographed."
The bigger takeaway has nothing to do with 28 versus 35. Pick one focal length and stick with it, long enough that you start seeing the world in that field of view before the camera reaches your eye. Chudley says a year with a single prime taught him to read where subjects will land and when the picture peaks, from twelve feet away, on instinct. His math is blunt: five years on one focal length beats one year across five. That's the part worth chewing on whether or not you agree that 28mm is the honest choice.
Watch the full breakdown in the video above to see the images Chudley uses to defend 28mm and where he admits 35mm still wins.
English (US) ·