The Value of Bringing a Telephoto Lens
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The article discusses the value of using a telephoto lens in photography, highlighting its ability to compress planes and create unique compositions, sparking a thoughtful discussion among commenters about their own experiences and preferences.
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https://mastodon.social/@UP8/tagged/9mm
If your goal is to show people something they haven't seen before the G Master telephoto is the last thing you want. If anything out of his photos I like the wide shot from the mountaintop better because it's lively and has people in it. One of the boring things about the average social photo stream is that it is either (a) selfies or (b) bugs and flowers and landscape and empty cityscapes.
Agreed. And strongly related to your other comment about selfies/bugs/flowers/boring landscapes…
One of the best pieces of advice for leveling up from novice snapshots to compelling photographs is: take photos about things, not photos of things.
Purposefully including people in the frame goes a long way to make photos more interesting because it instantly attaches a narrative.
Then in the middle there is a train station(?) where the narrative is also absent or muddled. The people arrived by train to do what?
I would argue the tight shot of the mountain and house is the best capture, because it tells a story of a beautiful place where someone lives.
I think there likely are ways to effectively include the people, by getting to a angle where you can isolate a couple of them and include the mountain. I suspect you could also get a good shot with the wide angle by moving closer to the people, although this would emphasize the people more than the mountain.
(1) good portraits
(2) photos that show players in opposition to each other
(3) photos that tell a story
Developing the habit to do (1) consistently is important because photos like that are still usable. If you just chase the action in most sports the ball is between you and a player and you get a lot of shots of people's behinds so looking for the places where people are open is foundational.
(3) is tough because a play involves a number of events that don't usually appear in one frame except for a few shots in a game like:
https://mastodon.social/@UP8/114849463914827733
I went through a phase of shooting everything at 10mm too. It’s a novelty that wears out fast if you’re not respecting rules of good composition.
Author is correct, the wide shot of the mountains cape is too busy and lacks a story. Despite lacking people, the tight shot is a stronger image.
I would agree with the author that telephoto makes it easier to get a clean composition... Walking around with a 35mm I end up taking almost no shots.
That's why I'm a big fan of medium tele (like 85mm or 105mm assuming 35mm format) for daily walk. Not for candid portrait, but tight framing without distractions.
Many many years ago, street photographers typically prefer wide angle lenses (which is still true these days). Saul Leiter broke the mold by embracing tele lens. Of course there are different feel. When standing really close with wide angle lens, your compositions felt immersive. But when tightly framed with (medium) tele, it felt... observant.
But probably that's an old habit: a few years ago my 1st DSLR was an APSC, and naturally my 1st prime like everyone else was the cheap-but-good 50/1.8, which is more or less equivalent to 85mm in FF world.
https://www.behance.net/gallery/232094025/Dragon-Day-2025
I got frustrated with switching between a wide and relatively long lens and having to clean up dust spots afterwards that I got one of these
https://outdoorx4.com/stories/field-review-tamron-28-200-f2-...
which is great for just walking around and I use it for outdoor running events where I can get pretty close and the long end is long enough but the wide end is good useful for crowds
https://www.behance.net/gallery/232159469/Skunk-Cabbage-Run-...
Thing is I sent out my old α7ii body out to be repaired and got a monster backpack
https://mastodon.social/@UP8/114866454342061662
so now I go out with two bodies and even more lenses though I tend to have a cycle of having a heavier and heavier pack until I get an injury, lightening up, healing, and then getting a heavier packer again.
I definitely enjoy prime lenses too, I have more 50mm's that I can rationally explain, also the Sony 90mm macro lens which DxO says is the best lens Sony makes
https://dustinabbott.net/2020/09/sony-fe-90mm-f2-8-macro-g-o...
which is not just good for macro work but also portraits and just random stuff. There is definitely something fun to spending a lot of time with a prime lens and working your perception of space around it. Back when I had a Canon I had just a 20mm full frame lens fitted to an APS-C body.
Its the fact that you are far away from the subject that compresses distances.
Once you have decided on the constraint to use a telephoto (to compress distances), you then move yourself away (as the article said) from the scene to be shot so that it fits the zoom factor. The relatives distances are what makes the compression, not the glass inside the lens. You could also take a wide picture and make a digital crop.
> effect a telephoto has
They're saying that it is not a property of the lens, but rather of the perspective of the scene viewed from a distance. You'd get the same effect using any focal length lens, taking the shot from the same location, and cropping appropriately.
Perhaps in contrast to depth of field which is a property of the lens.
I'm looking at the portraits of the woman on the beach and I'm not understanding how to get from one to the other with cropping. What am I missing?
Of course, on many cameras you then would get a smudgy or pixelated mess.
They could have used the 35mm lens at the same distance as the 150mm lens and simply cropped and the perspective compression would be the same (it'd just be a lower resolution image).
What you're describing as correct is what people understand. Of course it's the fact that you're far away. I think it goes without saying that you can't use a telephoto lens inside of a room or something.
And yes, of course you could take a wide picture and make a crop. But the resolution would be terrible. The whole point of a telephoto lens is to take that tiny crop of your environment at full resolution.
I'm sorry you learned it wrong at age 14 and maybe wherever you got it from really did explain it badly. But it's standard for professionals to talk about the effect of a long lens in this way, that the camera will be further away.
Edit0: Obviously you're also see the thing you're trying to get a picture of better
Of course analog zoom > crop, but only because reality < theory.
Anyway, I'd say you're technically correct but you might miss some angles and have some holes in the resulting images. But now with gaussian splats and AI we could reconstruct holes easily
Also, satellites photographing the Earth do it by moving the camera, and they can produce compression effects beyond what you'd get just because of their distance.
Contrary to many beginning photographers' instincts, a short to medium telephoto lens best allows the photographer to capture the point or points of interest and keep the distractions out of the frame.
https://www.venuslens.net/product/laowa-9mm-f-5-6-ff-rl/
is that the wide angle can make distracting things like power lines look really small in context and not so bothersome the way they are with moderate focal length lenses. Also I think very wide lenses can capture some of that panorama effect: I live near a state forest that I think is strikingly beautiful but most lenses can only capture a tiny bit of it, yeah you can get a flower or a bug or something, but be it a 20mm or a 200mm any attempt to go beyond macro photography falls flat.
The past decades have been decades of wide angle. Before the turn of the millennium wide angle photography was confined to mostly landscape, architecture and real estate. Often out of necessity and not because people liked the look.
It was in the early 90s that skater subculture chose wide angle out of necessity, but they also embraced the distorted look. From there it went into hiphop culture and became mainstream.
At the same time technological development also facilitated wide angle lenses because together with tiny sensors they can be easily fitted into mobile phones and action cams.
If people 100 years from now will look at our photos and watch our videos the wide angle look will be the dead giveaway of our era.
A significant number of the most famous photos from the mid century were taken on 35mm or wider lenses.
A big thing to consider is that good and practical extreme wide angle lenses didn’t exist until the 80s and 90s. Something like a 16mm f2.8 lens went from not existing to being in every pro photographers arsenal in the 1990s and 2000s
Skate videos created an explosion of very wide content at ~10-14mm.
Photography threads are interesting because they arrive with so many different interpretations of history. There are multiple comments claiming that “everyone” did one thing until a certain famous photographer or specific subculture came along and disrupted the world.
Yet like you said, the only real driver was the affordability and availability of equipment. When it became attained, people started using it.
It has to do with the ratio of the subject-camera distance to the background-camera distance.
As others have pointed out you prove this to yourself in one of two ways:
1. Frame with telephoto, then shoot with a wide angle lens and digitally zoom in photo.
2. Frame with wide angle and then shoot a panorama with the telephone and stich.
2 is significantly harder if you are close to the subject.
It does not matter if you crop an image taken with a 50mm lens to get the same area of the motive as taken with a 300mm lens from the same ‘standpoint’ - there will be no difference between foreground and background (except for grain and noise - but that’s another story… ;-)
You have to move the camera to change that.
This is often seen in movies (those shot on real film) as opposed to on video as zoom lenses are often used without moving the camera, film based often use a dolly to move the camera. The effect of combining zoom and camera movement to keep the same crop of the foreground while having a dramatic effect of the background quickly getting larger/closer (or vice versa) is really effective - also in illustrating this concept.
In my early life (before taking the education as a photographer) I was really liking wide angles as it brought ‘life’ in to a lot of pictures. Wide as in 24 mm for my 35mm camera (Nikon F2, from 1973 should you wonder) was a favorite, replacing my 28 mm.
Too bad full frame digital is still so expensive. Using a 14-24 f/4 on the DX format in (Nikon D7100) just is’nt the same.
So now the iPhone is the most used camera (you know - the camera you have with you…!)
since what you see through the viewvinder is what the taken picture will look like, it is neutral like/wrt your eyes, at the zero middle between wide angle and telephoto. (it's worth considering "who says eyes are neutral?" it's the system we are used to and our brain develops to understand)
it's non obvious to a casual observer that the mm units chosen for the image size (the image gets focused on a 35mm rectangle (you need to know the aspect ratio)) and mm for the focal length are measuring different things, but that's why you just need to "know" that 35mm and 50mm "equal neutral". there are more things measured in mm as well, like the actual width of the primary lens which indicates how much light is gathered to be focused onto the same square.
i'm not a photographer. i don't quite know the mm lingo for what happens when the image sensor/film is wider then 35mm, the large/full formats. the focal lengths "work" the same, but a larger image would need to be focused and that seems like it would require some larger distances within the lens system.
You can get a rangefinder style camera with a viewfinder that lets you shoot with both eyes open but has a 35mm POV.
People have a variety of theories as to why 50mm is considered the standard lens and why people say it mimics human vision. I have heard so many explanations that I am inclined to say that there’s not really much but opinion behind it. It might just be that it was the most common first lens and because it is cheap and relatively simple to make a good, fast 50mm lens.
the point of a "single lens reflex" system is that you can see what the picture will look like by looking through the same (single) optics
A Pentax MX for example shows .97x magnification at 50mm. It will work great for your trick. Meanwhile a Canon AE-1 has .83x magnification at 50mm meaning one eye will be seeing an image where everything is 17% different in size. It will be like one eye is looking at a 55 inch TV and the other eye is looking at a 45 inch TV. Or more accurately, one eye is looking at the same TV but from 17% farther away.
If you throw a 58mm lens on that Canon, the trick will work again because you are zooming in to compensate for the zooming out that is happening in the viewfinder.
Of course, none of this has anything to do with 50mm lenses being “standard”.
Don’t believe me? Go slap a 50mm lens on an SLR with very low magnification. Or read one of the dozens of articles and threads out there explaining your misconception. Here’s a great one: https://www.lomography.com/magazine/319909-cameras-in-depth-...
you are describing a different system that does not show you what the camera sees. I'm not saying what you are talking about doesn't exist, I'm saying that your over-inclusivity takes away the value of describing what I described and is telling people "there's really nothing you can say, a million different things could be going on"
In other words, your “standard” lens is an artifact of the optics chosen to allow your eye to see the image.
In terms of what your eye sees: The FOV of what you are focusing on with your eyes is narrower than a 50mm lens. The FOV where your eyes can recognize symbols (can read letters) is wider than a 50mm lens. The FOV that your eyes can see from periphery to periphery is drastically wider than 50mm.
Quite simply put, the fact that on some cameras you can shoot with both eyes open at 50mm is an artifact of design, not some natural law. This is proven by the fact that there are cameras where you can do this with a 35mm lens or a 60mm lens. Camera manufacturers settled on calling 50mm at 1.0x magnification a standard view is arbitrary.
There is precisely nothing behind the common belief that 50mm is the same view as your eyes. It isn’t.
You can keep insisting otherwise, but it is in contradiction with physics and nominal human anatomy.
Now, when you realize that there are geometric limitations to how wide an aperture can be relative to the focal length without having to stray from vaguely traditional _shapes_ of the objectives ("camera lens"), you can see that at the expense of fancier abberation corrections and of course larger/heavier glass lenses making up the larger objective, one could use a proportionally wider aperture with large format cameras.
For example, the infamous Barry Lyndon objectives were actually "just" 0.7x teleconverted spinoffs from an originally 70mm f/1 design. https://web.archive.org/web/20090309005033/http://ogiroux.bl...
This page doesn’t have any images but covers the concept quite well: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_lens
The concept of matching a picture to normal human vision goes back to the age of paintings, before any photography even existed.
https://findingrange.com/2022/01/14/7artisans-photoelectric-...
I had a long streak where I packed a DSLR with a 50mm everywhere I went and never took any pictures with it because I felt depressed. Switching to zoom lenses (particularly developing a protocol to get a distinct style of landscape protocols out of my kit lens) and getting into sports photography got me out of my funk, also that 7Artisan 50mm is so much more fun than any of the other 50's in my collection. Part of it is the challenge of manual focus, the other part is the extreme wide aperture which can take dreamy looking photos that are entirely different from what people have seen before.
I too fell for the dreamy look but as i've gotten older the further away from reality a picture is, the more my gut rejects it. At this point Ive seen so many high quality (either at shooting time or post processed) pictures of SF that going around the city actually visiting those places and seeing them with your eyes feels like a massive letdown
I'd categorize this as more of a portrait lens (than "normal" as the 50mm moniker implies).
Of course that meant we ended up with a bunch of scratches over the years on the lens, and I had my fair share of hitting the lens :)
Around flickr's prime I decided to write a little script that analyzed the EXIF of my photo catalog for actually used focal lengths and lo and behold they were pretty much centered around 50 mm. The fall-off to wider angles was pretty steep but for the longer focal lengths it only was pronounced after around 80 mm.
So, I got my self a fast nifty-fifty and I shoot it on APS-C (~80 mm) and full frame (50 mm) since. It is not quite telephoto territory but I'd say it gives you a result distinctly different from smartphone photography, especially the 80 mm.
Ask any Leica M users (both film and digital). Normally they only use primes to achieve compact setup. Any Leica user is automatically a snob, right?
Joking aside, I have nothing against zoom. For travelling, usually I don't need anything beside 24-70. Not a really compact setup, obviously, so need to downsize the image sensor. On APSC it would be 16-55. Or on MFT, it would be... hmm 12-40?
There are the two Tri-Elmar-M lenses (16-18-21, and 28-35-50) which select between discrete focal lengths instead of zooming continuously :-)
35mm (50mm on ASP-C) was faster (f1.8) and smaller and sharper than 18-55mm f3.5-5.6 kit zoom.
And then 85mm (130mm on ASP-C, f2.8) wasn't much bigger.
https://www.lightroomdashboard.com/
(Turns out I love 35mm on my Fujis)
Former Magnum and NatGeo photographer David Alan Harvey can get by with a cell phone.
I will say that shooting with a camera was way more engaging, active, exciting in the moment. And I haven't done studio photography in years. But I still take pictures that give people joy, and that's ultimately what counts.
f/8 and Be There:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F/8_and_be_there
I reluctantly joined them last year after selling my DSLR and lens collection.
I enjoyed my many DSLR years, but recently its become problematic :
So, yeah, previously I would sneer at the iPhone brigade. Now I've joined their ranks.A third of my phone shots are bad because I didn't have a telephoto lens, and half of those are just garbage.
I have a soda can size 55-210 and I'm never using lightweight travel as an excuse to not bring it again.
Anything you would recommend?
Figure out what you like on the cheap, and if you want to upgrade to a modern lens, you know what you're seeking for comparatively little money.
Technical version: Infinity focus is determined by how close the lens gets to the focal plane of the film or sensor. The various lens mount standards (some manufacturer specific, some widely genericized) specify the distance between the mounting flange and the focal plane. Mirrorless cameras can have a smaller flange distance than SLR's (because there's no mirror that has to swing through the space), and so you can optically adapt pretty much anything to mirrorless.
Optically being the operative word. You'll lose metering modes that depend on the camera getting info from the lens by either physical or electrical means. If you're shooting landscapes or product, this is unlikely to be a problem. If you're shooting action, you may want to disregard this suggestion.
EDITED TO ADD:
I haven't kept up with the mirrorless world since I bought mine, but if you're doing this get one where the image stabilization is implemented in the body.
I personally think most brands' 70-200 f/2.8 delight more than any 55-210 'kit' lens, which is often f/3.5-5.6. This is just based on my experience and letting people who have never used an interchangeable lens camera take and develop shots.
If someone is serious and going to step up from a cellphone to do some of this, my advice is to not mess around with something cheap like the discounted old APS-C body and lens kits that are usually outperformed by a cell.
Get a recent mirrorless body with good IBIS, and buy a nice prime and a telephoto zoom. High resolution (40-60MP) bodies can enable some tremendous landscape or crop opportunities. Focus on what a dedicated camera does better than a phone - interchangeable lenses, incredible autofocus and high shutter speed action, bokeh and compression (lens dependent), etc. Full-frame 35mm vs APS-C is the primary decision you have to make, any kit you're getting is affected by it.
The physics of bigger lenses, quality of esp. the full-frame lenses, the quality of the large sensors are a real treat for even new photographers.
I also have a 5D, and the 95% of the difference between the 5D and the RX-100 is the increased ergonomics, so if you aren't shooting seriously/professionally, you don't really have to bother with anything above a cheap, good Sony.
I guess I'm wondering what's the goal of making these kinds of picture? If it's just to produce the output, why not combine separate photos so you can get the mountains you want and the rocks and people you want without having to find them co-occurring naturally? If it's to follow some kind of rules for not cheating, why not do no hand-editing in software?
Eyes are subjective. The goal of manual post processing is often to make an image that replicates what the photographer saw, which is rarely possible with the automatic processing the camera does.
(Image data is always processed. No human can see raw photon counts.)
In these cases, it's clearly not to replicate what the photographer saw with his unaided eyes because he wouldn't have been able to see such detail so far away. Is it to replicate what he saw through the viewfinder?
A lot of photographers here. Do you guys impose some kind of personal restrictions on what types of processing or instruments you use to make it "honest" or not-cheating? How does that work?
When it comes to visual experiences, it is meaningless to talk about "honesty" because they are so subjective. That's one of the greatest joys of looking at other photographers' interpretations of familiar subjects: they see things so differently.
Restrictions on processing make sense, but they are not easy rules, because they depend on the purpose of the image. I suspect the most restricted are people in news -- they operate on similar principles as those who write the articles. In other words, there are no forbidden technical procedures, but the end product must effectively convey a real-world event (from some perspective -- news is always biased.)
One can still choose to deliberately misrepresent something that is subjective.
The experience is bigger than "saw".
Is it to hint at what they felt?
Later, looking at a purely-2d-visual representation is a different kind of experience than being there.
We don't need to, although in that case, we might think of what we are doing as digital painting rather than photography.
> some sense of legitimacy as being "real"
A photograph is a purely-2d purely-visual representation of what we inescapably experience as 3d and multi-sensory. It can be "a real photograph" but not "real".
If what we are interested in is a documentary representation then we are making some additional claims about how the "real photograph" was made.
> any emotion by cherry-picking from a huge set of shots
Once upon a time, in the age of film photography, photo-journalists did take a huge number of exposures and have someone else process the films, and then select particular frames from contact sheets. Digital reduces that cost.
However, when someone looks at a photograph, they bring all of themselves and a little of the photograph.
Yet there is somehow some sort of value in it being photography instead of digital painting. You see pictures where there photographer carefully planned for when the moon would be in just the right place next to some building or mountain, even travelling to strange places where such effects occur and patiently waiting for the right moment so they could take a photo that looks just the way they want it. It would have been much easier to just photograph the moon and the mountain separately then combine them on the computer. I want to understand the motivation for doing it the hard way. Is it the feeling of accomplishment for doing a difficult task? It can't be that it's more honest because telephoto lenses and other photography tricks make it less realistic, and can make the feeling different from what anyone actually experiences looking at it.
Let's say I took a picture of a old man beating a child with a cane.
In the video version of the photo I zoom out, and it's clearly a stage performance.
Or I take a picture of a man frowning in front of a demolished home.
In the video version the man happened to be walking by a construction of a new home and I said something to get his attention and snapped the photo on moody black and white film.
Framing is curating reality and you can evoke certain emotions or messages simply by what you choose to keep in and leave out of your frame.
The role the photo plays in your examples is simply to record the staged experience.
This has been a concern people have had for years. You might benefit from reading Susan Sontag's essay On Photography - https://writing.upenn.edu/library/Sontag-Susan-Photography.p...
My take, as soon as you pick up a camera to capture a scene you are telling a story and incorporating your own bias. For this reason, once I learned how cameras worked and dabbled in photography as an amateur it really transformed how I consume media. You could have the same subject and scene but tell a completely different story depending on the decisions you make as a photographer.
What if they were joined together by exposing 2 different overlapping film negatives?
You may enjoy "Faking it: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop"
https://www.google.com/books/edition/Faking_it/nGvTg_HC32YC?...
> get the mountains you want and the rocks and people you want
Digital painting? Too difficult, maybe just use Firefly "Adobe's online AI image generator" ;-)
When I started using TG-7 for street photography I noticed that full range of focal lengths is used, 24-100/f11-f27 (in 135 format), so 28mm is too limiting. Then, telephoto 80-300 turned out to be pretty useless during last vacations. Even in mountains, photos made with wider angle were better for me, maybe I do not have good eye for it.
Happy to read that some people out there are still going out and taking photos. My gear is sitting in a corner, is only touched once in a year when some "better pictures" are needed.
It's a shame, having a "good enough" camera in my pocket all the time really has ruined that hobby for me.
I realised a big reason I defaulted to my phone was simply that it's always there in my pocket, while my "real" camera was a burden to carry around. Related to the popular photography maxim that "the best camera is the one you have with you".
One day, after "seeing" some good shots in my head and totally missing them due to phone camera limitations, I decided I had to fix it. I started with an RX100 (I got the M3 secondhand at a decent price), which is as pocketable as a phone and immediately improved things for me.
Eventully that reminded me how much I enjoyed real photography, and now I often cart a big camera and multiple lenses around with me again. Oh well :)
That was my problem. Went to an air show and used my iPhone 13 and got some good pictures. iPhone 16 comes out and it’s got a 5x zoom and the best camera ever. You’re gonna love it. And the pictures were better but still ok.
So I’ve gone all in and bought a proper Canon mirrorless and a selection of lenses including a 100mm to 400mm and it’s miles better.
I tell the camera what to focus on , I set everything and I control what it does no software second guessing me and taking a lovely picture of a tree and not the eurofighrer in the background.
I love that it’s got one job and it does it brilliantly.
- challenging lighting. The phone will give you a more legible out-of-the-box processing, but is there a better photo if you let the background be blown out, or the foreground be in deep shadow?
- shots with textured things where the difference between the "sweater effect" sharpening and "natural" texture becomes apparent in a "reduce the eye strain from everything being hyper-sharpened" way
- night shots generally - it's been nearly ten years since long-exposure-blur-reduction night modes on phones, and they have a very specific look that's pretty different and generally fairly artificial when you see alternatives
- high shutter speed / motion - especially in lower lighting where the phone is gonna choose less noise
- cropping; make use of the bigger sensor and more pixels compared to the phone
lightroom and similar other tools with modern noise reduction systems go along way to get wow-factor out of handheld high-iso raw files compared to camera stabilization/processing
- takes better photos than phones (esp. when printed)
- is not crazy expensive
- is not crazy complicated
The camera you'd buy if you did not want to make photography a hobby but phones don't cut it.
Any of those is great. There is also a sub-$1000 category but the cameras in it are more compromised.
If you want to spend less, buy used Nikon Z or Canon R series.
For my next trip I'll bringing the Tamron 15-30mm and a D850. That lens is crazy sharp and for getting a full 45MPx resolution picture you often need a very good stabilizer even at "normal" exposure times.
(That problem is pretty much solved for modern mirrorless systems. They have very efficient in-camera stabilizers.)
Quite heavy setup. But it covers 95% of my photographic style without changing lenses too often.
I jest but you can actually get cool effects with the right projections.
*https://hugin.sourceforge.io/
I also brought a 85mm prime which has been a lot of fun, while at the same time I've been lugging around a 35mm prime and barely used it.
This is why I'm such a big fan of Micro Four Thirds. I carry the PanaLeica 100–400mm (200–800mm equivalent) in my regular camera bag even on miles-long hikes because it's so light at 985g / 2.2lbs: https://www.stevehuffphoto.com/2016/05/02/the-mighty-panason...
The darktable tutorial in this article is nice. I discovered the haze removal and hue-shifting stuff myself through trial and error but never thought to use the mask tool to isolate areas of images. I have some old shots I could probably revive like that.
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