The Value of Bringing a Telephoto Lens

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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 :)

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?

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)

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 :

     1. The whole personal security thing, the world has changed and not in a good way.  The number of places you can comfortably walk around with $$$ worth of camera kit in a bag ... LET ALONE take the camera out of the bag without needing eyes at the back of your head is decreasing FAST.

     2. I got sick and tired of being subjected to secondary screening at airports in certain parts of the world where the security guys are not used to seeing a bag of DSLR kit and/or it being a country where they are "sensitive" about what long-lenses can be (theoretically) used for.

     3. The whole insurance thing has become a pain the backside.  Premiums constantly increasing, but more importantly, so do all the get-out clauses which means you struggle to find a policy that deals with the reality of traveling with cameras.

Anything you would recommend?

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.

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.)

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.

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" ;-)

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.

- 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

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.