Posted by freediver 5 days ago
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.
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
Skate videos created an explosion of very wide content at ~10-14mm.
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.
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.
I too fell for the dreamy look but as i've gotten older the further away from reality a picture is, the more my gut rejects it. At this point Ive seen so many high quality (either at shooting time or post processed) pictures of SF that going around the city actually visiting those places and seeing them with your eyes feels like a massive letdown
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.
Now, when you realize that there are geometric limitations to how wide an aperture can be relative to the focal length without having to stray from vaguely traditional _shapes_ of the objectives ("camera lens"), you can see that at the expense of fancier abberation corrections and of course larger/heavier glass lenses making up the larger objective, one could use a proportionally wider aperture with large format cameras.
For example, the infamous Barry Lyndon objectives were actually "just" 0.7x teleconverted spinoffs from an originally 70mm f/1 design. https://web.archive.org/web/20090309005033/http://ogiroux.bl...
It does not matter if you crop an image taken with a 50mm lens to get the same area of the motive as taken with a 300mm lens from the same ‘standpoint’ - there will be no difference between foreground and background (except for grain and noise - but that’s another story… ;-)
You have to move the camera to change that.
This is often seen in movies (those shot on real film) as opposed to on video as zoom lenses are often used without moving the camera, film based often use a dolly to move the camera. The effect of combining zoom and camera movement to keep the same crop of the foreground while having a dramatic effect of the background quickly getting larger/closer (or vice versa) is really effective - also in illustrating this concept.
In my early life (before taking the education as a photographer) I was really liking wide angles as it brought ‘life’ in to a lot of pictures. Wide as in 24 mm for my 35mm camera (Nikon F2, from 1973 should you wonder) was a favorite, replacing my 28 mm.
Too bad full frame digital is still so expensive. Using a 14-24 f/4 on the DX format in (Nikon D7100) just is’nt the same.
So now the iPhone is the most used camera (you know - the camera you have with you…!)
It has to do with the ratio of the subject-camera distance to the background-camera distance.
As others have pointed out you prove this to yourself in one of two ways:
1. Frame with telephoto, then shoot with a wide angle lens and digitally zoom in photo.
2. Frame with wide angle and then shoot a panorama with the telephone and stich.
2 is significantly harder if you are close to the subject.
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.
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 :)
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.
I realised a big reason I defaulted to my phone was simply that it's always there in my pocket, while my "real" camera was a burden to carry around. Related to the popular photography maxim that "the best camera is the one you have with you".
One day, after "seeing" some good shots in my head and totally missing them due to phone camera limitations, I decided I had to fix it. I started with an RX100 (I got the M3 secondhand at a decent price), which is as pocketable as a phone and immediately improved things for me.
Eventully that reminded me how much I enjoyed real photography, and now I often cart a big camera and multiple lenses around with me again. Oh well :)
That was my problem. Went to an air show and used my iPhone 13 and got some good pictures. iPhone 16 comes out and it’s got a 5x zoom and the best camera ever. You’re gonna love it. And the pictures were better but still ok.
So I’ve gone all in and bought a proper Canon mirrorless and a selection of lenses including a 100mm to 400mm and it’s miles better.
I tell the camera what to focus on , I set everything and I control what it does no software second guessing me and taking a lovely picture of a tree and not the eurofighrer in the background.
I love that it’s got one job and it does it brilliantly.
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.
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.
(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:
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 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.
I would agree with the author that telephoto makes it easier to get a clean composition... Walking around with a 35mm I end up taking almost no shots.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
- takes better photos than phones (esp. when printed)
- is not crazy expensive
- is not crazy complicated
The camera you'd buy if you did not want to make photography a hobby but phones don't cut it.
Any of those is great. There is also a sub-$1000 category but the cameras in it are more compromised.
If you want to spend less, buy used Nikon Z or Canon R series.
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.
- challenging lighting. The phone will give you a more legible out-of-the-box processing, but is there a better photo if you let the background be blown out, or the foreground be in deep shadow?
- shots with textured things where the difference between the "sweater effect" sharpening and "natural" texture becomes apparent in a "reduce the eye strain from everything being hyper-sharpened" way
- night shots generally - it's been nearly ten years since long-exposure-blur-reduction night modes on phones, and they have a very specific look that's pretty different and generally fairly artificial when you see alternatives
- high shutter speed / motion - especially in lower lighting where the phone is gonna choose less noise
- cropping; make use of the bigger sensor and more pixels compared to the phone
lightroom and similar other tools with modern noise reduction systems go along way to get wow-factor out of handheld high-iso raw files compared to camera stabilization/processing