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Comments (105)

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  weinzierl
  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.
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  danielodievich
  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
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  PaulHoule
  Kinda funny, I find myself moving in the opposite directionhttps://mastodon.social/@UP8/tagged/9mmIf 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.
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  anta40
  "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.
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  GrayShade
  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.
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  majgr
  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, forestsWhen 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.
• DiscoMinotaur
  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
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  dsego
  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.
• Lammy
  > 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.
• skylurk
  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/
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  weinzierl
  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.
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  xnx
  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).
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  esafak
  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.
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  kqr
  Great idea to showcase Darktables advanced masking functionality! That and wavelet decomposition are areas where Darktable easily beats the incumbent Adobe Lightroom.
• syncsynchalt
  Safari desktop users: you'll want to view this page in Chrome; the sliders are functional on that browser.
• fallinditch
  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.
• NoiseBert69
  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.
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  dogleash
  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.
• MartijnBraam
  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.
• fennecbutt
  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).
• busyant
  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 :-( ).
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  foxglacier
  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?
• lvl155
  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.
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  simondotau
  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.
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  cratermoon
  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.
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  ttoinou
  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.