The value of bringing a telephoto lens | Hacker News Reader

The value of bringing a telephoto lens

avidandrew.com

122 pointsfreediver131 comments

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.

> Many, many famous photojournalists and artists embraced wide angle decades before skater culture did.

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.

35mm photos might have been “wide” historically but it’s not very wide. Even the main camera on iPhones are around 28mm.

Skate videos created an explosion of very wide content at ~10-14mm.

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.

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.

Relative size of subject and background is cause by distance to them, not focal length.

Both, actually.

Well, no. This article has some clarifications: https://petapixel.com/is-lens-compression-fact-or-fiction/

It’s entirely independent of focal length.

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.

Also called ‘perspective’ and the only way to change it is to move the position of the camera

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…!)

If you have 50mm lens, try it. It will look exactly same as if you are looking through a tube with a naked eye.

if you take a 35mm SLR with a 50mm lens and rotate it vertically (portrait) and hold the viewfinder up to one of your eyes, and leave the other eye open, your binocular vision will merge the two images with no problem/distortion, as if you were not holding a set of lenses up to one eye.

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.

The large format ones get a higher FOV in degrees. IIRC if you keep absolute aperture the same and change focal length to keep FOV the same, the DOF won't perceptually change.

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...

The phenomenon you describe is a function of viewfinder magnification. It so happens that many SLRs had their magnification such that it worked well at 50mm to shoot with both eyes open. There are SLRs that have different magnification so this trick doesn’t always work.

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.

if that trick doesn't work, then either 1. your viewfinder is not showing what you will shoot which is what everybody expects because otherwise how can you frame your shot, 2. you are not using a 50mm lens or 3. you are not using a 35mm SLR

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

No. As I stated, if the trick doesn’t work at 50mm it is because you are using a viewfinder with a different magnification.

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-...

technically speaking, if your viewfinder has a different magnification, that is (to coin a word) Multiple Lens Reflex; you have added a lens. SLRs were invented to show you "what the camera sees" so you can tweak it perfectly on different dimensions.

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"

Every slr with an eye level viewfinder (instead of focusing on a waist level ground glass) has optics in it. It is an MLR by your wording. Your eye has to focus on the reflection of a ground glass within an inch or so, or else is viewed through a lens that makes it possible to see what the camera sees. You wouldn’t be able to focus with your eyes if there wasn’t another lens.

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.

well, why don't you bring your physics and human anatomy arguing-from-first-principles over to wikipedia and let's see how long your changes last on that camera page :) good luck!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-lens_reflex_camera

opening paragraph

"In photography, a single-lens reflex camera (SLR) is a type of camera that uses a mirror and prism system to allow photographers to view through the lens and see exactly what will be captured... SLR technology played a crucial role in the evolution of modern photography...the rise of mirrorless cameras in the 2010s has led to a decline in SLR use and production. With twin lens reflex and rangefinder cameras, the viewed image could be significantly different from the final image."

what you see through the viewfinder is what the camera will take a picture of; you can change lenses so it is not always neutral. but if the zoom of the lens it neutral, what you will see through the viewfinder is neutral, and that occurs at 50mm for a 35mm camera

You still haven’t understood what I’m saying. You are either very mistaken or you are explaining what you are trying to say very incorrectly.

Nothing that I’m saying is contradicted by that Wikipedia article.

I have, on my desk, no less than three 35mm film SLRs that will not allow you to see with both eyes open using a 50mm lens. I have already given you a link to an article explaining it, as well as explained it myself.

The image you see through a normal film SLR is the image that the lens is projecting onto a surface that is further transformed in the prism, you can see this surface by removing the lens and looking at the top of the inside of the camera above the mirror directly behind the lens. That image on the ground glass surface is then transformed using another set of lenses and mirrors in the prism so that you can put your eye to the lens and see it right side up, and focus your eye as if the image were not less than an inch away on a piece of ground glass.

There is no SLR on earth that does not have additional optics between you and the image projected on the ground glass. In modern cameras the ground glass and additional optics are a single piece with the flat side facing down and either a fresnel lens or a normal glass lens on the top.

Those optics inside the prism, that every single eye level finder SLR has, are what decide whether or not a 50mm lens shows an image to the photographer that is comparable in size to what they see with their other eye. If it is 1x magnification at 50mm it is the same size. Otherwise it is not. You can look up the magnification for any SLR. There is also the completely different coverage spec that SLRs have that tells you what percentage of the full image to be projected on the film that will be shown in the finder. You can have cameras that show the full image at lower magnification, in the same way that you can see the full image after printing on a 4x6 photo, or on a 8x12 photo.

What is crucial to understand, that you have continually missed, is that there is not a “neutral” spot that occurs naturally at 50mm. It is an artifact of design on many, but by no means all, cameras. A Nikon D850 has viewfinder coverage of 100% and a magnification of .75x at 50mm. That means that the viewfinder, with a 50mm lens attached, will show the entire image to be recorded, and the image will be 75% the size that my other eye sees it. It will give you a headache to try and shoot both eyes open. My Nikon F90x has similar specs for the viewfinder, to preempt any notion that this is because of digital. It is referenced to 50mm because it has to be referenced to something and the most popular focal length is the one that manufacturers settled on. Some SLR cameras show a smaller, but still complete version of the image that the lens is projecting. ALL SLRs need an additional lens in the prism to make it possible to see anything at such short distances. The nature of that internal lens and the prism is what determines the magnification not the lens that you attach.

If you go look at the Wikipedia link that you found there is a cutaway diagram showing the additional lens that you are viewing the image through. That combined with the article I linked earlier explain it very thoroughly.

Good luck with your journey to understanding of this concept.

This is a million times easier to demonstrate with images than text. Wikipedia has a good animation: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perspective_distortion

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.

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.

The problem with this is that without AF, you are very restricted to shooting still objects with the aperture wide open.

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

The image circle of this is APS-C sized => 1.5x crop factor => 75mm "full frame" equivalent.

I'd categorize this as more of a portrait lens (than "normal" as the 50mm moniker implies).

Love that you mentioned the skateboarding history of it. I have fond memories of our young crew finally acquiring a “death lens” for our VX1000. It was such a fun challenge to see how close you could get because it looked so sick.

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 :)

My wife is a professional photographer, amongst many other things. She's always had a camera since young age. I've been her equipment sherpa for couple of decades, hauling progressively larger bags full of lenses and stuff around. Our children have learned from her and have now taken over this. This last summer one of them asked for a gigantic sports lens (something can't remember ###70?-400mm) as a birthday present for themselves. My wife and him went halfsies at the end. That thing is a monster, has its own handle so you can hold the darn thing without wrenching the lens mount out of alignment. all 3 of them took amazing pictures with it, of birds, animals, Blue Angels, faraway mountains, and some nice candids of people faraway. The only downside I see is that it is impossible to carry that lens and all the others and the camera in a bag, we need even a larger one. Super cool to see children doing neato stuff like that

It's a bit difficult from your post to assess whether your children are 3, 13, 23, 33, 43, or possibly 53 years old.

70-400 or 80-400 are "common" ranges for super telephoto lenses. Great shots are possible with them, I was able to use one for a day, it was fun switching between "rather" wide and very narrow.

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.

Interestingly, it was what pushed me back into it. Even just capturing family stuff, the limitations of smartphone cameras were always niggling, the article gives one example of why, but focal length is just one of the things you gain more control over with a real camera.

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 :)

>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.

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.

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.

Gives me Google Street View vibes but with old pixel art palettes.

> I like the wide shot from the mountaintop better because it's lively and has people in it

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.

Alright, so continue the exercise. In the image in the article, what is the narrative for the people in the foreground? We can’t see where they are coming from or where they are, and their actions don’t seem well defined.

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 like the mountain and house myself. The wide shot isn’t a bad photo but it is pretty cluttered and the parts don’t really work together like you say.

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.

I've been through this with sports, the hierarchy is

(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

Ironically the first thing I notice on your photostream is an empty cityscape. Here’s a tip: ultra wide angle is useful for pulling you in close to an object that’s in the foreground. If you leave the center empty, as with the shot of the storefronts, you’ve made another boring image (only with widely diverging lines.)

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.

Interesting, different tastes I guess. I find the wide mountaintop shot to be pretty lackluster compositionally because everything is oddly spaced out and half of it is empty (sky). I often have this problem when shooting wide angle - because of the perspective distortion, the high density centre area is small and the edges are super low density.

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.

"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.

85mm is one of my favorite lengths for sure it just looks so good

Yep me too. I tend to "see" in that focal length, when 50mm is not tight enough.

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.

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.

When I did this shoot

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.

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 ;)

Zooming in and out worked on my iOS device to trigger it to load properly.

Me too on Firefox in Windows.

Worked for me in Firefox Android (the race condition theory seems likely).

Is there some line photographers are crossing by taking two photos of separate scenes and joining them together in software to create a picture like the people sitting on the log in front of the mountains? I think that would be called photoshopped and fake, but here they're describing manually selecting the background and adjusting its contrast so it ends up looking like it couldn't look in real life. Is that qualitatively better for something?

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?

> ends up looking like it couldn't look in real life.

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.)

You mean people's brains selectively enhance the contrast of the mountains so he's trying to reproduce that perception?

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?

Yes, people's brains selectively modify contrast, saturation, detail, framing, and just about every parameter there is.

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.)

> it is meaningless to talk about "honesty" because they are so subjective.

One can still choose to deliberately misrepresent something that is subjective.

> Is it to replicate what he saw through the viewfinder?

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.

If it's art, to induce a feeling in the audience, then I don't see why you need to restrict it to actual photos of actual things. Once you start tweaking the picture, you can make it feel like all sorts of things that it's not, or appear to be something it's not, so why not go the whole hog and just create an image with whatever tools you can? It seems like photographs some with some sense of legitimacy as being "real" even though photographers can distort how things look to convey some feeling. Susan Sontag's essay described taking many photos of a subject until they showed the right emotion. So you can make anyone look like any emotion by cherry-picking from a huge set of shots.

> I don't see why you need to restrict it to actual photos of actual things.

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.

> we might think of what we are doing as digital painting rather than photography.

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.

Some people might think so. In an art class a professor once told us that all photography can be a lie whether edited or not. Consider:

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.

It isn't that "photography can be a lie"; it's that an experience can be staged.

The role the photo plays in your examples is simply to record the staged experience.

> Is there some line photographers are crossing by taking two photos of separate scenes and joining them together in software to create a picture like the people sitting on the log in front of the mountains?

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.

I was highly disappointed with Sontag's piece because it felt dismissive of the joy and craft of painting with light. As the tools available for faking it have become ubiquitous, and the bias more up front and center, I've come to find her conclusions overly reductive. My favorite photography is earnest, which she considers inconsequential.

> joining them together in software

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" ;-)

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

Usually, when travelling, a lot of things, like architecture, or people are different, that is why I want everything possible in focus. That is why my perfect combination for travel is (in 135 format): - 24mm/f2.8 for indoors - 24-90mm/f8, for streets, parks, forests

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.

Framing can be more difficult, but one "trick" with a telephoto lens is to find a neat detail to focus on and adjust the frame around the neat detail.

> Let's review some shots taken with a telephoto to see how we can justify its size and weight.

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.

Moving from the Fuji x-t30 with an 18-55 kit lens (and a couple of primes) to x100vi showed me how less impressed everyone around me is with my photos. While I find the x100vi really fun to shoot with and it simplifies my setup, it really makes it difficult to get photos that won't look like phone snapshots and that ordinary people can appreciate. Everyone loves that uncluttered professional look with out-of-focus backgrounds and compression. Zooming with your feet is not always possible and the same for getting close, getting too close to fill the frame with a 35 equivalent sometimes just ruins the moment. The wide lens also just make things look smaller than we see them, so tall buildings and high mountains aren't as dramatic in the pictures as in real life.

Phones exaggerate textures and flatten lighting, so when shooting at similar angles I like some of these things:

- 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

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)

>> I thought fixed focal length photography was pretentious snobbery

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?

> Normally they only use primes to achieve compact setup

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 :-)

This is funny, at one point I became convinced 50mm is too "boring" of a focal length, and almost sold mine. Then I realised some of my best shots were taken at 50mm. It's a good neutral perspective when the scene is already composed well as seen by the eye's perspective (approximately).

> I thought fixed focal length photography was pretentious snobbery.

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.

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.

Oh that 9mm is my absolute favorite lens (a close second being a 105mm). It's surprisingly versatile, too - I've done street photography, architecture (probably where it excels the most), landscape, and even macro.

I had a phase when I only had a 35mm-equivalent prime and was happy for a long time, I have a lot of lenses now but I can imagine having just that 9 and not getting bored for a long time though I wouldn't be doing sports -- if you can find flower beds that are exceptionally deep it even takes good flower photos but the only beds I can find that deep are the ones my wife maintains, if I got to Ithaca or Cornell flower beds just aren't deep enough that I can hold the lens over them and have flowers all the way to the edge.

Related to my other comment on here, but why not use AI editing tools to cut out the signs and poles, instead of buying a special lens? It would have the same effect of replicating how it felt to look at in real life.

With hugin* and some patience a telephoto is the only lens you need ;)

I jest but you can actually get cool effects with the right projections.

*https://hugin.sourceforge.io/

It's a shame you have to choose between devices with excellent optics and terrible software/processing (DSLRs) and devices with excellent software/processing but severely limited optics (phones).

It would be great if the software stack on full frame cameras was more open to third party developers. Samsung tried this with a fork of Android as the base camera OS but the product fizzled in the market.

I shoot candid and I am at the age and stage where my philosophy is simply "Just bring anything and take the picture". Tomorrow's technology will easily fix it; it's already pretty close.

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.

> Former Magnum and NatGeo photographer David Alan Harvey can get by with a cell phone.

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.

So, yeah, previously I would sneer at the iPhone brigade. Now I've joined their ranks.

Just bring anything and take the picture

f/8 and Be There:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F/8_and_be_there

Great idea to showcase Darktables advanced masking functionality! That and wavelet decomposition are areas where Darktable easily beats the incumbent Adobe Lightroom.

It's hard to beat the Lightroom AI masking though.

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.

I often use the 5x telephoto lens on my phone - the increased depth of field you get with small phone sensors means that the compression of the planes is exaggerated, with medium distance planes in focus as well as thebackground. This is an interesting effect in its own right, not always what you want, but a distinctive look that can work well.

I'm not much of a photographer even by amateur standards, so I figured my phone would be good enough to take some vacation photos for the memories.

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.

> a soda can size 55-210

Anything you would recommend?

Nope, I'm at the stage where making the best of cheap used gear is still way above my skill level. My opinions are worse than useless.

I'd like to second GP's reply and add that if you get a full-frame mirrorless camera and a couple of adapters, the world is your oyster for cheap, old lenses on eBay.

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.

Depends on what kind of action. Sunny 16 and hyperfocal distance lets you get away with a lot.

Canon, Sony, Fuji, Nikon. Lenses map to camera system bodies, so it's hard to just recommend a particular lens to someone without context.

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 got a Sony RX-100 for trips, I recommend it, the image quality is great and it has quite a bit of zoom (though I forget the exact lengths).

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 always bring my telephoto lens. Since moving to a full frame camera I'm using a 70-300 most of the time and I rarely want a wider lens, more often I wish I brought my 600mm instead.

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.

Safari desktop users: you'll want to view this page in Chrome; the sliders are functional on that browser.

Since there are a lot of photographers here - what's the first step up from phones? That is a camera that :

- 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.

https://m.dpreview.com/reviews/buying-guide-best-cameras-und...

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.

My main rule of thumb for landscape photography: the wider your angle of view, the more unoriginal your photo will probably be. Telephoto is where the photographer demonstrates their ability to reveal truly original compositions.

Yes, telephoto, tripod technique, stitch, crop, and trust that shows whatever you originally "saw".

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 :-( ).

The Sony 24-240 is such a versatile zoom lens. It's pretty compact for what it is, maybe just a touch heavy but it can do everything (with reasonable light).

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.

    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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

It took me a while to really believe that in a perfect, "spherical cow" kind of way, zoom = crop. Which is how digital zoom works.

Of course analog zoom > crop, but only because reality < theory.

You can easily correct lens distortion with Adobe Camera Raw, then what’s left (the difference) is almost just chromatic aberration and resolution

A similar misconception is that bigger sensors give shallower DOF than smaller sensors, which is also an effect of your position relative to the subject rather than the sensor itself.

Interesting !

Taking it a step further, compression is not a function of distance either. It's how parallel the rays are. You could also get compression up close by capturing the light field with some sort of spatially distributed camera (pushbroom camera?).

But if you had an algorithm that would change directions of rays, you would have a resulting image with implicitly a different position of the camera (closer or further away), no ? Unless you do some kind of psychedelic deformation.

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

In practice, you might struggle to do it well, but in principle, it could be a gigantic image sensor with no lens but a collimator on each pixel. You can angle the collimators to collect rays that would otherwise end up at the far-away camera.

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.

For satellite you’re talking about taking the same surface on earth from different angles as the satellite orbits ?

No. I mean pointing the camera in a fixed direction as the satellite orbits, so it scans a strip along the surface of the Earth. This makes the rays parallel across the field of view (in the movement direction), so it looks like the camera is infinitely far away.

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