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
> 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.
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 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.
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 :)
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.
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
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.
> 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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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
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.
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 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?
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).
Great idea to showcase Darktables advanced masking functionality! That and wavelet decomposition are areas where Darktable easily beats the incumbent Adobe Lightroom.
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.
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 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.
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'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.
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.
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.
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).
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 :-( ).
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?
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.
> 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.)
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 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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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 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.
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?).
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
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Relative size of subject and background is cause by distance to them, not focal length.
Both, actually.
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
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
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.
It's a bit difficult from your post to assess whether your children are 3, 13, 23, 33, 43, or possibly 53 years old.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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/
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.
"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.
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
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.
Zooming in and out worked on my iOS device to trigger it to load properly.
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 ;)
Safari desktop users: you'll want to view this page in Chrome; the sliders are functional on that browser.
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 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 :-)
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 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).
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 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 :
So, yeah, previously I would sneer at the iPhone brigade. Now I've joined their ranks.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.
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.
> a soda can size 55-210
Anything you would recommend?
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'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.
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 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.
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.
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).
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 :-( ).
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?
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.
> 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.)
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 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.
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?
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.
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.
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 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.
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
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?).