New CiC Techniques Page: Telephoto Lenses

[McQ]

I've just added another page to the techniques section of this website. It's intended as a general overview:

Using Telephoto Lenses

As usual, comments, typo corrections and suggestions are all welcome!

[arith]

Interesting read as usual full of useful stuff. I found this typo;

Longer focal lengths require shorter exposure times to minimize burring caused by shaky hands

where I think you mean't blurring. cheers

[McQ]

heh, thanks -- it's been fixed. I also just updated it a bit with some more info, in addition to re-wording other parts a little.

[David]

McQ - Another excellent tutorial. I like the way you give a slightly different "take" on a subject compared to other photography authors. One point of clarification - in the Landscape and Layers section do you mean that several shots with different focal distances should be taken and then blended via post-processing or am I missing something very straight forward?

Cheers

David

[McQ]

Thanks for the feedback David. By layering, I am just referring to composition -- nothing in post-processing. I've updated that paragraph to hopefully make it a little clearer:

However, telephoto landscapes just require different techniques. If you want to achieve an improved sense of depth, a common telephoto technique is to compose the scene so that it's comprised of layered subject matter at distinctly different distances. For example, the closest layer could be a foreground set of trees, the subsequent layers could be successively more distant hillsides, and the furthest layer could be the sky, ocean, and/or all other seeminly equidistant background objects.

Hope this helps...

[arith]

It is nice to have in writing what I suspected and better still the reason why; I probably wouldn't look for a reason unless I used the property a lot.

This is not the best photo; I could remember vaguely the properties of a telephoto and was pleasantly surprised when I saw this:


cheers

[PopsPhotos]

This is a great example how the "compression" of a telephoto lens actually adds to the composition. Nice shot.

Pops

[arith]

Cheers Pops