Compress Space with Telephoto Lenses

One of the interesting qualities that telephoto lenses have is that they compress space--and the longer the focal length is, the more the compressed space appears. We've all seen shots of a football player who is catching a pass and appears to be almost in the stands with the crowd. The reason they appear so close together is because the photographer used a very long lens and the space between the player and the spectators just evaporated.

In landscape photography compressing space can be a fun tool because it brings together distant elements in a very believable way. I photographed the sunset here outside of Tucson, Arizona using a 300mm lens (equivalent of 450mm on my Nikon D70s body because of the 1.5x cropping factor) and it appears that the saguaro cacti and the mountain range are relatively close. In reality the brushy hillside and the saguaro are about 100' from me but the mountain is probably 20 miles away (and the sun is millions of miles away!). But by using the power of the telephoto lens to shrink spaces, the three layers of the photo (hillside/mountains/sun) all appear incredibly compressed.

Next time you're out shooting landscapes, shoot a few frames of a scene with a normal lens and then either zoom in (using a built-in zoom lens) or, if you have a DSLR, switch to a long telephoto and compare the resulting images. It's great fun to see space compressed like this and the illusion is very convincing.

So if telephoto lenses compress space, what do wide-angle lenses do? Next time.

Turn the Camera Vertical

Have you ever noticed that most of the photos that people shoot are taken horizontally? Even when the subjects themselves are vertical--things like trees and other people and tall buildings, people try to squeeze them into a horizontal format. In fact, one of the biggest complaints I hear from photo editors at magazines is that even though virtually all magazines are essentially vertical, photographers still shoot more horizontal images.

I think the real reason that most of us shoot so many photos horizontally is because that's how cameras are designed to be held and used. The viewfinder is on the top in the middle, the camera controls are (mostly) on the top of the camera and the LCD on digital cameras is horizontal. But that doesn't mean it's the best orientation in creative terms. Lots of subjects cry out to be framed vertically and they'll seem a lot more balanced and powerful if you let them proudly express their height. So next time you spot a subject that's taller than it is wide, turn the camera 90-degrees and see if things don't look more natural.

By the way, those two saguaro cactus shown here were photographed in Sabino Canyon in Tucson, Arizona and they're two of the most photographed cactus in the state. They look like pals posing for the camera!