Thoughts on lenses….

I read a great article from a photographer nameed Patrick La Rogue and he made some very valid points about single focal length and zoom lenses.  Here is part of his article wheich I found very interesting!!

“I’ll put my cards on the table right away: I’ve developed a slightly tumultuous relationship with zooms. They’re very useful tools but I’ve come to realize they also tend to drive me into what I’d call visual laziness. When I decided to jump to the X system as my one and only kit, I also embraced the fact that I’d be shooting with nothing but primes. In fact much of that decision was coloured by my experience with the X100’s fixed focal length and the way it affected my shooting reflexes. Not that this was anything new: I used Nikon primes as well. But committing to a single focal length for extended periods of time wasn’t something I’d really done before. When I shoot a prime I need to move — Obviously; I need to walk in order to alter my distance to the subject; and while I walk my brain works, and when my brain works it notices its surroundings and finds details or angles I often would’ve overlooked otherwise. But with a zoom… No matter how much I try, it’s always much too easy to fall back to those old reflexes. Twist in, twist out. Maybe if we stopped calling them zooms in the first place. That word doesn’t do justice to what’s going on optically. Maybe instead we could describe them as multi-focal lenses. There’s definitely something pretty fantastic about having the equivalent of 8 primes on a single lens… IF you use it as such. IF you understand how to use each individual focal length in the right context, and how each one changes the entire aspect of an image way beyond making things look nearer or closer. Compression, distortion, spatial perception. Of course you can also use it to get a closer shot of that mountain way out there; but perhaps if you actually GO to the mountain, something amazing will happen along the way. Right, so where was I? Ah yes: no zooms for me. Huh…”  He goes on to talk about a zoom he really likes but still plans to use  it  as a series of single focal length lenses!

His point is dead on.  We can in fact get “visual laziness”!  I think making ourselves use either single focal length lenses or at least pick just one focal length on our zooms,  and move to try and make it work will improve our photographs and our vision as well!  Another thing we need to be very careful about is think that the effect of cropping factors making lenses something they are not.  Example a 6omm lens is a 60mm lens, but when used on a 1.5 crop factor sensor it “crops” to the size of an image made with a 90mm (60 X 1.5 = 90), However it is still a 60mm lens!!!  The reason I say this is that traditionally 85mm to 105 mm are considered the best portrait lenses, because of the perspective with which they show the human face.  So even thought a 60mm lens on a 1.5 crop sensor crops like a 90, it does not have the perspective of a 90!  This is why to be an effective photographer you need to learn what the perspective is at various focal lengths even if you use zooms!

Food for thought!  And thanks Patrick, for a good point we all need to think about!

Blessings,

the pilgrim