The value of bringing a telephoto lens

Posted by freediver 9/9/2025

The value of bringing a telephoto lens(avidandrew.com)

122 points | 131 comments

weinzierl 9/13/2025|

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.

dghlsakjg 9/13/2025||

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

harrall 9/13/2025|||

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.

Aurornis 9/13/2025||||

> 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.

weinzierl 9/13/2025|||

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.

exitb 9/13/2025|||

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.

PaulHoule 9/13/2025|||

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.

dcreater 9/13/2025|||

The problem with this is that without AF, you are very restricted to shooting still objects with the aperture wide open.

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

smilekzs 9/14/2025|||

The image circle of this is APS-C sized => 1.5x crop factor => 75mm "full frame" equivalent.

I'd categorize this as more of a portrait lens (than "normal" as the 50mm moniker implies).

paulsmith 9/13/2025|||

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.

weinzierl 9/13/2025||

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.

fsckboy 9/13/2025|||

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.

namibj 9/14/2025|||

The large format ones get a higher FOV in degrees. IIRC if you keep absolute aperture the same and change focal length to keep FOV the same, the DOF won't perceptually change.

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...

dghlsakjg 9/15/2025|||

The phenomenon you describe is a function of viewfinder magnification. It so happens that many SLRs had their magnification such that it worked well at 50mm to shoot with both eyes open. There are SLRs that have different magnification so this trick doesn’t always work.

You can get a rangefinder style camera with a viewfinder that lets you shoot with both eyes open but has a 35mm POV.

People have a variety of theories as to why 50mm is considered the standard lens and why people say it mimics human vision. I have heard so many explanations that I am inclined to say that there’s not really much but opinion behind it. It might just be that it was the most common first lens and because it is cheap and relatively simple to make a good, fast 50mm lens.

fsckboy 9/15/2025||

if that trick doesn't work, then either 1. your viewfinder is not showing what you will shoot which is what everybody expects because otherwise how can you frame your shot, 2. you are not using a 50mm lens or 3. you are not using a 35mm SLR

the point of a "single lens reflex" system is that you can see what the picture will look like by looking through the same (single) optics

dghlsakjg 9/15/2025||

No. As I stated, if the trick doesn’t work at 50mm it is because you are using a viewfinder with a different magnification.

A Pentax MX for example shows .97x magnification at 50mm. It will work great for your trick. Meanwhile a Canon AE-1 has .83x magnification at 50mm meaning one eye will be seeing an image where everything is 17% different in size. It will be like one eye is looking at a 55 inch TV and the other eye is looking at a 45 inch TV. Or more accurately, one eye is looking at the same TV but from 17% farther away.

If you throw a 58mm lens on that Canon, the trick will work again because you are zooming in to compensate for the zooming out that is happening in the viewfinder.

Of course, none of this has anything to do with 50mm lenses being “standard”.

Don’t believe me? Go slap a 50mm lens on an SLR with very low magnification. Or read one of the dozens of articles and threads out there explaining your misconception. Here’s a great one: https://www.lomography.com/magazine/319909-cameras-in-depth-...

fsckboy 9/15/2025||

technically speaking, if your viewfinder has a different magnification, that is (to coin a word) Multiple Lens Reflex; you have added a lens. SLRs were invented to show you "what the camera sees" so you can tweak it perfectly on different dimensions.

you are describing a different system that does not show you what the camera sees. I'm not saying what you are talking about doesn't exist, I'm saying that your over-inclusivity takes away the value of describing what I described and is telling people "there's really nothing you can say, a million different things could be going on"

dghlsakjg 9/16/2025||

Every slr with an eye level viewfinder (instead of focusing on a waist level ground glass) has optics in it. It is an MLR by your wording. Your eye has to focus on the reflection of a ground glass within an inch or so, or else is viewed through a lens that makes it possible to see what the camera sees. You wouldn’t be able to focus with your eyes if there wasn’t another lens.

In other words, your “standard” lens is an artifact of the optics chosen to allow your eye to see the image.

In terms of what your eye sees: The FOV of what you are focusing on with your eyes is narrower than a 50mm lens. The FOV where your eyes can recognize symbols (can read letters) is wider than a 50mm lens. The FOV that your eyes can see from periphery to periphery is drastically wider than 50mm.

Quite simply put, the fact that on some cameras you can shoot with both eyes open at 50mm is an artifact of design, not some natural law. This is proven by the fact that there are cameras where you can do this with a 35mm lens or a 60mm lens. Camera manufacturers settled on calling 50mm at 1.0x magnification a standard view is arbitrary.

There is precisely nothing behind the common belief that 50mm is the same view as your eyes. It isn’t.

You can keep insisting otherwise, but it is in contradiction with physics and nominal human anatomy.

fsckboy 9/16/2025||

well, why don't you bring your physics and human anatomy arguing-from-first-principles over to wikipedia and let's see how long your changes last on that camera page :) good luck!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-lens_reflex_camera

opening paragraph

"In photography, a single-lens reflex camera (SLR) is a type of camera that uses a mirror and prism system to allow photographers to view through the lens and see exactly what will be captured... SLR technology played a crucial role in the evolution of modern photography...the rise of mirrorless cameras in the 2010s has led to a decline in SLR use and production. With twin lens reflex and rangefinder cameras, the viewed image could be significantly different from the final image."

what you see through the viewfinder is what the camera will take a picture of; you can change lenses so it is not always neutral. but if the zoom of the lens it neutral, what you will see through the viewfinder is neutral, and that occurs at 50mm for a 35mm camera

dghlsakjg 9/16/2025|||

You still haven’t understood what I’m saying. You are either very mistaken or you are explaining what you are trying to say very incorrectly.

Nothing that I’m saying is contradicted by that Wikipedia article.

I have, on my desk, no less than three 35mm film SLRs that will not allow you to see with both eyes open using a 50mm lens. I have already given you a link to an article explaining it, as well as explained it myself.

The image you see through a normal film SLR is the image that the lens is projecting onto a surface that is further transformed in the prism, you can see this surface by removing the lens and looking at the top of the inside of the camera above the mirror directly behind the lens. That image on the ground glass surface is then transformed using another set of lenses and mirrors in the prism so that you can put your eye to the lens and see it right side up, and focus your eye as if the image were not less than an inch away on a piece of ground glass.

There is no SLR on earth that does not have additional optics between you and the image projected on the ground glass. In modern cameras the ground glass and additional optics are a single piece with the flat side facing down and either a fresnel lens or a normal glass lens on the top.

Those optics inside the prism, that every single eye level finder SLR has, are what decide whether or not a 50mm lens shows an image to the photographer that is comparable in size to what they see with their other eye. If it is 1x magnification at 50mm it is the same size. Otherwise it is not. You can look up the magnification for any SLR. There is also the completely different coverage spec that SLRs have that tells you what percentage of the full image to be projected on the film that will be shown in the finder. You can have cameras that show the full image at lower magnification, in the same way that you can see the full image after printing on a 4x6 photo, or on a 8x12 photo.

What is crucial to understand, that you have continually missed, is that there is not a “neutral” spot that occurs naturally at 50mm. It is an artifact of design on many, but by no means all, cameras. A Nikon D850 has viewfinder coverage of 100% and a magnification of .75x at 50mm. That means that the viewfinder, with a 50mm lens attached, will show the entire image to be recorded, and the image will be 75% the size that my other eye sees it. It will give you a headache to try and shoot both eyes open. My Nikon F90x has similar specs for the viewfinder, to preempt any notion that this is because of digital. It is referenced to 50mm because it has to be referenced to something and the most popular focal length is the one that manufacturers settled on. Some SLR cameras show a smaller, but still complete version of the image that the lens is projecting. ALL SLRs need an additional lens in the prism to make it possible to see anything at such short distances. The nature of that internal lens and the prism is what determines the magnification not the lens that you attach.

If you go look at the Wikipedia link that you found there is a cutaway diagram showing the additional lens that you are viewing the image through. That combined with the article I linked earlier explain it very thoroughly.

Good luck with your journey to understanding of this concept.

fvgvkujdfbllo 9/13/2025||||

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.

_aavaa_ 9/13/2025||

Relative size of subject and background is cause by distance to them, not focal length.

tveyben 9/14/2025|||

Also called ‘perspective’ and the only way to change it is to move the position of the camera

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…!)

fvgvkujdfbllo 9/14/2025||||

If you have 50mm lens, try it. It will look exactly same as if you are looking through a tube with a naked eye.

hk__2 9/13/2025|||

Both, actually.

_aavaa_ 9/14/2025|||

It’s entirely independent of focal length.

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.

rozab 9/13/2025|||

Well, no. This article has some clarifications: https://petapixel.com/is-lens-compression-fact-or-fiction/

Aurornis 9/13/2025|||

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.

nop_slide 9/13/2025||

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 :)

danielodievich 9/13/2025||

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

martin_a 9/13/2025||

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.

MattJ100 9/14/2025||

Interestingly, it was what pushed me back into it. Even just capturing family stuff, the limitations of smartphone cameras were always niggling, the article gives one example of why, but focal length is just one of the things you gain more control over with a real camera.

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 :)

thedrbrian 9/14/2025||

>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.

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.

emil-lp 9/13/2025||

It's a bit difficult from your post to assess whether your children are 3, 13, 23, 33, 43, or possibly 53 years old.

PaulHoule 9/13/2025||

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.

caseyohara 9/13/2025||

> 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.

PaulHoule 9/13/2025|||

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

relaxing 9/13/2025|||

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.

actuallyalys 9/13/2025||

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.

bix6 9/13/2025|||

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.

relaxing 9/13/2025|||

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.

mcdeltat 9/14/2025|||

Interesting, different tastes I guess. I find the wide mountaintop shot to be pretty lackluster compositionally because everything is oddly spaced out and half of it is empty (sky). I often have this problem when shooting wide angle - because of the perspective distortion, the high density centre area is small and the edges are super low density.

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.

AlecSchueler 9/13/2025||

Gives me Google Street View vibes but with old pixel art palettes.

anta40 9/13/2025||

"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.

bix6 9/13/2025||

85mm is one of my favorite lengths for sure it just looks so good

anta40 9/13/2025||

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.

vt240 9/13/2025||

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.

PaulHoule 9/13/2025||

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.

GrayShade 9/13/2025||

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.

lunasorcery 9/13/2025||

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.

jtwaleson 9/13/2025|||

Thanks, I was wondering if this was some rich high-quality screen thing I was too poor to understand ;)

MattJ100 9/14/2025|||

Worked for me in Firefox Android (the race condition theory seems likely).

oktoberpaard 9/13/2025||

Zooming in and out worked on my iOS device to trigger it to load properly.

brokenmachine 9/15/2025||

Me too on Firefox in Windows.

foxglacier 9/13/2025||

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?

ImPleadThe5th 9/13/2025||

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.

igouy 9/16/2025||

It isn't that "photography can be a lie"; it's that an experience can be staged.

The role the photo plays in your examples is simply to record the staged experience.

stuxnet79 9/13/2025|||

> 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?

This has been a concern people have had for years. You might benefit from reading Susan Sontag's essay On Photography - https://writing.upenn.edu/library/Sontag-Susan-Photography.p...

My take, as soon as you pick up a camera to capture a scene you are telling a story and incorporating your own bias. For this reason, once I learned how cameras worked and dabbled in photography as an amateur it really transformed how I consume media. You could have the same subject and scene but tell a completely different story depending on the decisions you make as a photographer.

gausswho 9/13/2025||

I was highly disappointed with Sontag's piece because it felt dismissive of the joy and craft of painting with light. As the tools available for faking it have become ubiquitous, and the bias more up front and center, I've come to find her conclusions overly reductive. My favorite photography is earnest, which she considers inconsequential.

igouy 9/13/2025|||

> joining them together in software

What if they were joined together by exposing 2 different overlapping film negatives?

You may enjoy "Faking it: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop"

https://www.google.com/books/edition/Faking_it/nGvTg_HC32YC?...

> get the mountains you want and the rocks and people you want

Digital painting? Too difficult, maybe just use Firefly "Adobe's online AI image generator" ;-)

kqr 9/13/2025||

> 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.)

foxglacier 9/13/2025||

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?

kqr 9/13/2025|||

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.)

igouy 9/13/2025||

> it is meaningless to talk about "honesty" because they are so subjective.

One can still choose to deliberately misrepresent something that is subjective.

igouy 9/14/2025|||

> Is it to replicate what he saw through the viewfinder?

The experience is bigger than "saw".

Is it to hint at what they felt?

Later, looking at a purely-2d-visual representation is a different kind of experience than being there.

foxglacier 9/15/2025||

If it's art, to induce a feeling in the audience, then I don't see why you need to restrict it to actual photos of actual things. Once you start tweaking the picture, you can make it feel like all sorts of things that it's not, or appear to be something it's not, so why not go the whole hog and just create an image with whatever tools you can? It seems like photographs some with some sense of legitimacy as being "real" even though photographers can distort how things look to convey some feeling. Susan Sontag's essay described taking many photos of a subject until they showed the right emotion. So you can make anyone look like any emotion by cherry-picking from a huge set of shots.

igouy 9/15/2025||

> I don't see why you need to restrict it to actual photos of actual things.

We don't need to, although in that case, we might think of what we are doing as digital painting rather than photography.

> some sense of legitimacy as being "real"

A photograph is a purely-2d purely-visual representation of what we inescapably experience as 3d and multi-sensory. It can be "a real photograph" but not "real".

If what we are interested in is a documentary representation then we are making some additional claims about how the "real photograph" was made.

> any emotion by cherry-picking from a huge set of shots

Once upon a time, in the age of film photography, photo-journalists did take a huge number of exposures and have someone else process the films, and then select particular frames from contact sheets. Digital reduces that cost.

However, when someone looks at a photograph, they bring all of themselves and a little of the photograph.

foxglacier 9/19/2025||

> we might think of what we are doing as digital painting rather than photography.

Yet there is somehow some sort of value in it being photography instead of digital painting. You see pictures where there photographer carefully planned for when the moon would be in just the right place next to some building or mountain, even travelling to strange places where such effects occur and patiently waiting for the right moment so they could take a photo that looks just the way they want it. It would have been much easier to just photograph the moon and the mountain separately then combine them on the computer. I want to understand the motivation for doing it the hard way. Is it the feeling of accomplishment for doing a difficult task? It can't be that it's more honest because telephoto lenses and other photography tricks make it less realistic, and can make the feeling different from what anyone actually experiences looking at it.

DiscoMinotaur 9/13/2025||

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

majgr 9/13/2025||

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.

growingkittens 9/13/2025|

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.

Lammy 9/13/2025||

> 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.

dsego 9/13/2025|

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.

majormajor 9/13/2025|

Phones exaggerate textures and flatten lighting, so when shooting at similar angles I like some of these things:

- 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

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