The focal length you use will heavily influence the final look of your image. That’s why it’s important to know when to use a wide angle vs telephoto lens.
In this article we’ll go through all you need to know about choosing between a short focal length vs a long one.
On full frame cameras, a ‘normal lens‘ gives the same field of view as your eyes. That’s 50mm. A lens with focal lengths shorter than 35mm is considered to be a wide angle.
Wide angle lenses are often broken down into three sub-types depending on the focal length:
Wide angles and UWA produce a rectilinear image. Straight features, such as building walls, appear with straight lines, as opposed to being curved.
In other words, they are lenses with little or no barrel or pincushion distortion.
The rectilinear perspective will cause objects to appear increasingly stretched and enlarged as they near the edge of the frame.
These types of lenses are often used to create forced perspective effects.
Example of forced perspective in portraiture: by getting close the model at 30mm, I could alter the body proportion and put more “weight” on the hands.
This image illustrates well the curvilinear barrel distortion typical of the fisheye lenses.
Telephoto lenses have focal lengths longer than those of normal lenses. They’re longer than 50mm on a full frame camera.
Telephoto lenses are also broken into further sub-types, typically:
Medium telephotos are often used in portraiture because of the little distortion. You can also use them in landscape photography to isolate a subject like an interesting tree.
A medium telephoto lens can be used for landscape, to isolate a particular object, like I did here for this tree in silhouette.
A visit to a zoo is the perfect opportunity to take advantages of long telephoto lenses. Sony RX10 @ 200mm
By curving straight lines such the horizon, the left bank of the channel and the dock on the right, the viewer can be guided naturally towards the subject, the castle in this photo.
Panorama with a 56mm EFL lens.
A panorama with a telephoto lens will let you capture much more details than in a single wide angle image.
Big moon rising. Image Credit: blingrocks, CC BY
Until now we have referred to full frame cameras, but what happens when you use a cropped sensor camera?
If you don’t know much about sensors, I suggest you to have a look at our article for an in-depth discussion of the subject.
In a nutshell, a cropped sensor camera has a sensor that is smaller than the full frame format (36mm x 24mm). The size of the sensor will affect your photography in many ways.
The most obvious effect of using a small sensor is on the field of view. For a given focal length, a crop sensor camera will give you a narrower field of view than a full frame camera.
The focal length you use it directly influence the way you frame and compose the shot and the feeling the resulting image will convey.
It is also responsible for introducing some optical effects in your images. These include depth of field, perspective and distortions.
Let’s break down the most important differences in shooting with a wide angle lens vs shooting with a telephoto lens.
As said before, the main difference in using a wide angle or telephoto lens is in the field of view you get. Wide angle lenses (on full frame) cover fields of view in the range 64° to 84°, with UWA arriving to more than 100°.
A typical wide angle landscape.
The extremely wide field of view of a fisheye lens allowed me to photograph the tall skyscraper in front of me as well as part of the building behind me.
The full moon, at different focal lengths
A less obvious difference between wide angle and telephoto lenses is in the resulting depth of field.
In general, for a given sensor, aperture and camera-to-subject distance, short focal lengths produce larger the depth of field than telephoto lenses.
This is very useful, for example, in landscape photography. A rule of thumb says to focus 1/3rd into the scene and you will have everything in focus, from a few meters away up to infinity.
The huge depth of field of a wide angle lens allowed the photographer to have both the foreground and the background sharp. Image Credit: Alessandro Torri.
Candid shot of my daughter playing in the woods during a family outing. Shooting at 200mm with my Sony RX10 camera allowed me to make her stand out from the busy, distracting forest in the background.
When switching from a wide angle lens to a telephoto one, there is also a change in perspective. Telephoto lenses that tend to compress the distances between different planes in the image.
The images below show my kids playing. At 24mm (EFL), you see a great depth in the image, you can see that my daughter and my son are well apart.
At 200mm (EFL), you see the perspective is much more compressed and the kids seem to be closer.
The effect of perspective compression when moving from 24mm to 200 mm.
Along with a large field of view, come distortions. No wide angle lens will be distortion free, except in the middle of the frame.
This is not a problem in landscape photography, where normally there are no straight lines to make distortions evident. But it can be a problem in architecture photography or portraiture.
This image was taken with a fisheye lens, but since a natural landscape has few straight lines, distortions can be “hidden”.
This photo of my daughter was taken at 24mm from less than half meter away: the typical big nose effect is evident.
A typical funny fisheye portrait.
Other than the main differences illustrate above, there are also some practical differences when using a wide angle vs a telephoto lens.
In the latest years, so-called super-zoom lenses have become more and more common. These are lenses that cover an extremely wide range of focal lengths, from as wide as 18 mm up to 300 mm or more, like the Sigma 18-300mm f/3.5- 6.3 DC Macro OS HSM C for Canon.
Interestingly, bridge and compact cameras such as Sony RX10 IV (24-600 mm) and RX100 VI (24-200 mm) have super-zoom lenses. This makes them perfect travel cameras.
A fast superzoom is a must when it comes to travel photography. Sony RX10.
The Moon at 24mm EFL.
The latest Super Moon I photographed at EFL 2500. The Nikon P1 would give even stronger magnification.
This article has presented you some of the difference in shooting with a wide angle and with a telephoto lenses.
To master those lenses you have to practice shooting with them in different contests. Do not be afraid to be creative and break some rules.
