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“You can line up a road and a mountain and the road looks normal to your eye, while the mountains are perceived as really big in the photo. For this reason, telephoto lenses can create incredibly dramatic landscapes and skyline photos.
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“If you want the background to have more presence and be more noticeable in the image, a telephoto lens is a great tool,” says Ohst. When you back up and use a longer lens, it compresses the person’s facial features.
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Nobody wants their nose to look bigger in an image. That’s a really bad thing when you’re photographing people, because the nose is closest. “A wide-angle lens will emphasise the distance between things, so whatever is in the front of the image, it pulls it toward you. Telephoto lenses in the 70 mm to 85 mm range are great for creating portraits. But usually people shooting wildlife photos want at least 400 mm, maybe even more.” “Of course, the bigger the lens, the higher the cost, so there’s a balance between getting as close as you want versus the affordability of the gear. “For wildlife photographers, a telephoto lens is the most critical piece of gear in their kit,” says Ohst. The magnification of a telephoto lens is essential to capture the details of animals without disturbing them. These lenses can work wonders for distant wildlife, photos of people and cityscapes or mountainscapes. You can photograph just about anything with a telephoto lens, as long as it’s far enough away from you to be within your lens’s focal range. Alternatively, a crop sensor like the APS-C will create images that are slightly more zoomed in than you might expect, no matter what lens you attach.Ĭommon subjects to shoot with telephoto lenses. A full-frame camera has a full-frame sensor, which shows your entire image in the viewfinder. When you choose a lens, remember to check whether you have a full-frame camera or a camera with a crop factor. A 500 mm prime lens is a common tool for bird photography. If you need a wide aperture or a sharper image, prime is your best bet. Zoom lenses offer versatility, but prime lenses can often achieve a wider maximum aperture and sharper images. You can adjust a telephoto zoom lens to different focal lengths, while a telephoto prime lens is made for one focal length. These offer the most extreme magnification for the smallest or furthest away subjects, like birds in flight. A good lens for landscape photography, it lets you go between a wide angle of view with 24 mm and the compression effect of 70 mm.ħ0 mm-200 mm lens: A fairly common telephoto zoom lens range that is great for portraits and can emphasise large background elements like mountains or a city skyline.Ģ00 mm-500 mm lens: This range of focal lengths helps photographers capture wildlife at a distance, sports photography shots and other situations where you require some magnification.ģ00 mm and higher: Any lens over 300 mm is a super telephoto lens. It’s all about showing scale.”Ģ4 mm-70 mm: A zoom lens that spans from 24 mm to 70 mm crosses the bridge between the longest wide-angle lens and the shortest telephoto lens. “My biggest thing is also compression - being able to put a small person in a huge scene or a huge mountain behind a small road. “It’s being able to zoom in and focus on a more select subject,” says photographer Adam Ruggieri. Telephoto lenses are also great for getting close-ups or for highlighting impressive differences in size. “And that’s really helpful, like if you have some beautiful mountains that you want to emphasise in your image.” There’s something called compression that happens with a longer lens where whatever is in the background seems to be visually closer,” says photographer Julia Ohst. “Telephoto lenses get you close to your subject. While shorter focal lengths exaggerate subjects closest to you, telephoto lenses allow you to emphasise and bring faraway subjects closer, from people to wildlife to mountains. Telephoto photography is a type of photography that brings distant subjects closer with the use of long focal lengths.
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