The lens you use has a huge effect on how your photos look. A wide-angle lens will give you a much greater field of view, while a telephoto lens will magnify distant objects. These aren’t perfect, though: the photo will look like it was taken with whatever lens you used.
There are weird optical quirks like barrel distortion with wide-angle lenses—straight lines appear to curve—and compression with telephoto lenses—objects appear much closer together—that come with using different lenses.
So what do you do if you want a photo to look something like the real world? For everything to appear how you see it in front of you and not strangely distorted by your lens? That’s when you use a “normal lens”.
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What Is a Normal Lens?
A normal lens is one that best approximates the optical characteristics of the human eye. In other words, the photos taken with a normal lens look closest to how we see the world. This has nothing to do with aperture, but is entirely dependent on the focal length of the lens.
It’s difficult to perfectly compare human vision to cameras; both work in very different ways. Our eyes aren’t the equivalent of any specific lens. Instead, there are a range of focal lengths that will create photos that look roughly the same. There will always be differences, but the photos shouldn’t look distorted like a wide-angle or telephoto photo can.
On a full-frame camera, a normal lens is considered to have a focal length of 50mm. This was set by the creator of the Leica camera system, Oskar Barnack, pretty much arbitrarily. In reality, any lens with a focal length of between about 40mm and 58mm will look roughly like how things appear to your eyes.
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