Minolta MD 24mm f/2.8
A real eyeopener (litterally) and the start of my still ongoing wideangle craze
The 24mm on a film camera was a revelation! I had had a 35mm as my widest wideangle before, and even though that is generally considered a wideangle lens, I have long ago removed it from the really wide end on my scale. In my eyes a 35mm is just a plain normal lens with a bit more in the field-of-view. On modern DSLR's with a small sensor it is exactly that as a matter of fact. With a cropping factor of 1.5 or 1.6 you wind up with a 52.5mm or a 56mm film equivalent. A normal in other words.
So "real" 24mm on a film camera was a novelty for me, and I started getting some stunning perspective in my images. I learned to tilt the camera and lens to place the "central" stuff in the corners or at least not in the central 9th of the picture.
And whoa! My pictures suddenly looked like the ones I saw in photo journalism, where the wide angle had always been used to approach people and get really close visually. This was the key: wide angle allows you to go close to the subject and still get the ambience of the surroundings.
You also get some great perspective and you get a good depth-of-field. This was manual focus, remember, so focusing was a part of photography. And just pointing, clicking and winding without worrying too much about exact focus was just perfect.