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.

"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 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 :-( ).

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-processing.