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.
The Canon 100mm Macro is my favorite walk around lens. I really enjoy the exercise of framing shots with the prime lens. I felt like for me having a medium zoom, 24-105mm like most beginning photographers, I'd become over reliant on changing the focal length without properly evaluating the perspective and framing of the shot.
The biggest award is that your images will look differently from nearly everything that is posted today, especially if you get close.
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.
Many, many famous photojournalists and artists embraced wide angle decades before skater culture did.
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
That is true. A lot of journalism and street photography is 35 mm
and that was considered wide by then. The difference is that distortions were seen as an error back then. Wider angles were, as you said, not widely available but I think also not much desired. This changed in the 90s when some embraced the distorted look and made it part of our photographic vocabulary.
Can’t overlook the influence of phone photography, which is usually wider (~26mm equivalent) than what was considered standard in the 90s (~35mm). These days even a 50mm will make your pictures stand out.
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.
Another good rule of thumb to remember is that a 50mm lens on a 35mm sensor ("full-frame") is roughly the equivalent FOV of the human eye, i.e., what you see naturally.
I never understood that argument. By pure FOV the human eye is much wider. Of course it is not that simple, spacial resolution drops off to sides (while temporal resolution increases). This makes statements like "50 mm on 35 mm is FOV of human eye" not very meaningful.
The way I understand is that it is not FOV but zoom level. If you look through a camera with 50mm lens, the subject and background should appear same size as when viewed with naked eyes. Doesn’t matter if it is full frame or crop sensor.
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.
Interesting I find the telescoping shots to be unique because the phones can do macro, wide, and mid range well but the tele is still weak compared to a proper camera.
In the beginning of digital photography I shot mostly zooms. I thought fixed focal
length photography was pretentious snobbery. Selecting a set of lenses, lugging them around and constantly changing them. Who has time for that?
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.
The author does make a compelling argument for using a telephoto to compress planes--the shot of the people on the bench with the mountains in the back gives a good example (even though the bench and rock-wall are tilted :-( ).
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.
Great use of Darktable masks here, particularly the mask contrast slider to grab the edges of the mountains. Super powerful software but the learning curve is steep
We are pretty close to replicating compression in AI. At the end of the day, you’re better off capturing more info/detail and post-process. You also have to think about re-processing images down the road when tech improves.
Seems like there's a race condition between the images loading and the script setting up the sliders; if the script runs before the 'before' image for a given slider has finished loading, that 'before' image won't be visible at all. Happens under Chromium-based browsers too.
The visual effect of the sweeping panorama our eyes see doesn't translate to a wide-angle image.
When we view a scene such as the one in the first image,
we aren't looking at it all at once.
Instead, our attention moves from one area of interest to another,
generating in our minds an idealized representation free of the inconsequential distractions like wires, ugly signs, and utility poles.
The camera records everything, and reduced to the smaller, self-contained artifact of the print or image on the screen, these distractions become picture elements.
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.
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 compression effect a telephoto has can be used even more dramatically to tie together different planes in a scene
This somehow is a common misconception from non-engineers. I read and believed that when I was 14 years old, at some point I tested on photoshop to overlay pictures taken at different zooms factors and found that telephoto DO NOT compress scenes.
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.
Not only is a digital crop an absolute loss in resolution, different focal lengths produce different image quality, from the different perceived thickness of the zone of focus at equivalent stop and the stength of the blurring outside the zone of focus.
Edit0: Obviously you're also see the thing you're trying to get a picture of better
Of course ! This can be explained if we have more time. But the basic explanation should never lead us to believe compression is the property of a lens
I interpreted "compression effect" to mean exactly what you're saying it does. I'm not familiar with what you're saying it does not do. I have never heard of that misconception.
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.
The photographer had to move quite a bit further back to get the subject to be the same size in the frame at 150mm as the subject was at 35mm.
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).
I think you're misunderstanding, and have come up with a strawman here.
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.
Of course. I wish it was better explained. No, not everyone interprets the words to get the correct view. The words used are awful and some photographers are responsible of this.
I don't think it's a strawman. I've definitely seen a lot of people think that the perspective compression is a result of lens choice rather than camera position.
"Avoiding Distractions"
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.
The Canon 100mm Macro is my favorite walk around lens. I really enjoy the exercise of framing shots with the prime lens. I felt like for me having a medium zoom, 24-105mm like most beginning photographers, I'd become over reliant on changing the focal length without properly evaluating the perspective and framing of the shot.
85mm is one of my favorite lengths for sure it just looks so good
The biggest award is that your images will look differently from nearly everything that is posted today, especially if you get close.
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.
Many, many famous photojournalists and artists embraced wide angle decades before skater culture did.
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
That is true. A lot of journalism and street photography is 35 mm and that was considered wide by then. The difference is that distortions were seen as an error back then. Wider angles were, as you said, not widely available but I think also not much desired. This changed in the 90s when some embraced the distorted look and made it part of our photographic vocabulary.
Can’t overlook the influence of phone photography, which is usually wider (~26mm equivalent) than what was considered standard in the 90s (~35mm). These days even a 50mm will make your pictures stand out.
Particularly if it this kind of of 50mm
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.
Another good rule of thumb to remember is that a 50mm lens on a 35mm sensor ("full-frame") is roughly the equivalent FOV of the human eye, i.e., what you see naturally.
I never understood that argument. By pure FOV the human eye is much wider. Of course it is not that simple, spacial resolution drops off to sides (while temporal resolution increases). This makes statements like "50 mm on 35 mm is FOV of human eye" not very meaningful.
The way I understand is that it is not FOV but zoom level. If you look through a camera with 50mm lens, the subject and background should appear same size as when viewed with naked eyes. Doesn’t matter if it is full frame or crop sensor.
Kinda funny, I find myself moving in the opposite direction
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.
Interesting I find the telescoping shots to be unique because the phones can do macro, wide, and mid range well but the tele is still weak compared to a proper camera.
In the beginning of digital photography I shot mostly zooms. I thought fixed focal length photography was pretentious snobbery. Selecting a set of lenses, lugging them around and constantly changing them. Who has time for that?
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.
I have used this tool to run the same analysis with Lightroom:
https://www.lightroomdashboard.com/
(Turns out I love 35mm on my Fujis)
The author does make a compelling argument for using a telephoto to compress planes--the shot of the people on the bench with the mountains in the back gives a good example (even though the bench and rock-wall are tilted :-( ).
I'm moving to the opposite direction.
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.
Great use of Darktable masks here, particularly the mask contrast slider to grab the edges of the mountains. Super powerful software but the learning curve is steep
We are pretty close to replicating compression in AI. At the end of the day, you’re better off capturing more info/detail and post-process. You also have to think about re-processing images down the road when tech improves.
If you're wondering why the differences in the image pairs under the sliders are so subtle, try loading the page in a Chromium-based browser.
Seems like there's a race condition between the images loading and the script setting up the sliders; if the script runs before the 'before' image for a given slider has finished loading, that 'before' image won't be visible at all. Happens under Chromium-based browsers too.
Thanks, I was wondering if this was some rich high-quality screen thing I was too poor to understand ;)
The visual effect of the sweeping panorama our eyes see doesn't translate to a wide-angle image. When we view a scene such as the one in the first image, we aren't looking at it all at once. Instead, our attention moves from one area of interest to another, generating in our minds an idealized representation free of the inconsequential distractions like wires, ugly signs, and utility poles. The camera records everything, and reduced to the smaller, self-contained artifact of the print or image on the screen, these distractions become picture elements.
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.
An odd discovery I made using this lens
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.
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.
Not only is a digital crop an absolute loss in resolution, different focal lengths produce different image quality, from the different perceived thickness of the zone of focus at equivalent stop and the stength of the blurring outside the zone of focus.
Edit0: Obviously you're also see the thing you're trying to get a picture of better
Of course ! This can be explained if we have more time. But the basic explanation should never lead us to believe compression is the property of a lens
I interpreted "compression effect" to mean exactly what you're saying it does. I'm not familiar with what you're saying it does not do. I have never heard of that misconception.
Parent directly quoted the relevant text:
> 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.
https://www.tamron.com/global/consumer/sp/impression/detail/...
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?
The photographer had to move quite a bit further back to get the subject to be the same size in the frame at 150mm as the subject was at 35mm.
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).
You have to take several steps back, then take the picture and crop.
Of course, on many cameras you then would get a smudgy or pixelated mess.
I think you're misunderstanding, and have come up with a strawman here.
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.
Of course. I wish it was better explained. No, not everyone interprets the words to get the correct view. The words used are awful and some photographers are responsible of this.
I don't think it's a strawman. I've definitely seen a lot of people think that the perspective compression is a result of lens choice rather than camera position.