Optics

As you grow in your craft as a photographer, you become more intimate with the tools of your expression. Among the most significant of these aesthetic tools are your lenses. As you become increasingly familiar with them—assuming you do it mindfully and pay attention—the more readily you’ll be able to predict the look that each focal length creates. After 25 years I’m only now getting to the point where I can look at an image and guess, with some accuracy, the focal lengths used, but it shouldn’t have taken me this long. For years I didn’t pay attention, and that delay has cost me in my ability to best visualize images before putting the camera to my eye.

I’m not a zealot about it, but I think the ability to see a scene through various lenses in your mind’s eye—even in rough approximations—is as important as a painter knowing what brushes give a certain aesthetic. It’s for this reason I’m an unrepentant advocate of being mindful. Never mind how much stuff a wide-angle lens permits within the frame, though that’s one of the behaviors of a wide-angle lens. The more important questions are, How does it treat the elements in the frame? What does it do to lines? Does it have the appearance of compressing elements or expanding them?