Tuesday, June 9, 2009

Wide-angle vs telephoto

Judging by the questions I get every week and the number of people that tend to stumble across my blog after typing the words 'telephoto vs wide angle' or the other way round into a Search Engine - well it seems that lenses can be a bit confusing.

So I want to spend a bit of time this week talking about different lenses and what they do. For today's post I want to point you in the direction of some posts I've made in the past highlighting different uses for lenses.

Of course you can always try this yourself by just typing lenses into the Search engine on your right there. Or you could type telephoto, or wide angle. You'll come across a whole heap of posts showing lots of examples. In the meantime here's some of my favourites.

This one shows you how to work the different lenses in a big crowd of people and the mindset behind choosing different focal lengths.

This one will show you how to clean up a messy scene by using a telephoto lens. It's also a really good one for showing you how you can bring two distant objects and have them really close in the final composition.

This one will show you how telephoto lenses help to make things look really big!

This one will show you how to train your eye to see like a telephoto lens.

And that should keep you busy for a little while! As I said there's others here on the blog, just type in your favourite search word and they'll all come up. Starting from tomorrow I'll post some images based on the focal length and talk a little bit about them.

Brownie points for guessing that the shot above was taken with a wide angle lens. This is author and TV personality Kathy Lette who I photographed when she was out here in Australia a couple of years ago.

And just word of thanks to those people who have booked to come along to my photography course from interstate. I am truly humbled and honoured that people would come so far to listen to me waffle for two days! Thanks guys and I'm looking forward to a great weekend.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Nice post, but all of the links that you reference talk about using telephotos.

Unknown said...

Thanks Jeff,

I was hoping the first two would kind of illustrate the difference between the two but realised afterwards that it was probably a bit telephoto-centric. That's why this week I've just been posting wide angle pictures. Also if you do a search there should be a heap of wide angle posts come up.

Or if you have any questions feel free to fire away and I can either answer them here or do a whole post for you.

Thanks for taking the time to Comment and I hope you like the blog.

cheers

Paul