… is different – depending on what lens you choose. Choose wisely.
One of the joys of photography is being able to use a different lens for a different perspective. Something very far away can be brought ‘closer’ by a long (telephoto) lens. We can add depth to a flat scene with a shorter (wide) lens.
Interesting though that the scene itself doesn’t change. Only our ‘perspective’ of it does. The scene is a reality that exists whether we are photographing it or not, and all we can do with it is choose our POV.
Kinda like life.
A very talented photographer who is just starting out recently noted that he may be a failure after spending a year and not making any money at it. That was his lens of the moment.
For the last few years he has spent a ton of money on getting the best equipment that he could afford – without being extravagant or a gearhead – and working at his craft with great commitment and passion. Hell, I wish I could shoot as often as he does.
But work had not found him, and he was feeling the pinch of that telephoto lens. That’s the one that reaches out and magnifies the small things on the horizon making them look quite large to the viewer. Large and formidable.
In reality they are hardly noticed when standing there without the camera and scanning the scene ahead for a possible composition. We choose the telephoto to reach out, grab that small, insignificant element and by doing so elevate it to the “hero” of the photograph. The isolation of the subject removes much of the context, so it is without a relationship to that which is around it.
Kinda like life.
In life we put those telephotos on our minds and reach out to find the small things, the little incongruous parcels of our life and we magnify them to ‘fill the frame’. What was a single incident is magnified into ‘the way it is” in our minds. What was small and perhaps inconsequential becomes elaborately framed and presented as THE star of our focus.
Now if we stayed in that telephoto mode, most of our lives would be filled with small, tiny fractions of our life enhanced by magnification into massive failures, huge challenges and a resignation to defeat.
Hey… let’s not do that shit, OK!
Let’s put on a nice normal lens. Like a 50MM f1.2 (hey, why not). Now we can see far more of our life and those things we were looking at with the 300MM we actually have to find and pinpoint in the distance. Guess what? They are tiny in the landscape of our lives laying out in front of us. In fact, the reality in front of us has changed their meaning and importance immensely. What was large and in charge is now small and sorta, well, blurry. (I did mention that it was an F1.2, right?)
Sure looks different in reality land.
There are more choices for us to see, more context available, more in our viewpoint than small details – even though the details are important. The details help provide the context and the context may be vastly different than the details would indicate one by one.
Kinda like life.
Details help us define the fabric of ourselves. The perfect stitching, the smooth thread, the tightly designed patterns. But taken overall, the fabric is a mosaic of those details and flies with unbridled passion in the wind. We aren’t the stitching, we are the cloth rippling and flapping in the stiff breezes of our world.
Hey – what about that wide angle?
Ahh – my go to lens has always been the 35MM (FF) which is only a bit wider than the ‘normal’ lens. It helps me define context. It helps me see what I SEE when I am looking. I call it my “real” lens, and I could simply shoot that lens forever if I had to.
I am also fond of the 24MM and 28MM. I used to use the 20MM a lot, but now it is beginning to look a lot like snapshots with my favorite smart phone, so they only get used when I want to add to the context of reality before me. Using a wide angle lens helps push distant things away, and pull the smaller things that are most important toward you. While the use of a wide angle can isolate like a telephoto, the isolation is within the context of all that is around it.
Kinda like life.
Sometimes we need to see those details in the context of pure focus, and remove the distractions by bringing the details front and center. Nothing like focusing on what needs to be done while keeping an eye on what surrounds us.
Whether it is our business, our marketing, our personal relationships, the “wide angle” view helps make it easier to spend the time where needed. Yes, we are keeping an eye on all around us, but the detail in the center is consuming most of our attention.
There are times in our lives where we need to see the context of our lives through these different lenses. We can use a telephoto approach to finding and isolating challenges to be met, a normal length perspective for making sure we are grounded in the reality and a wide angle approach to focus on those areas that need to be approached while keeping our attention elsewhere as well
Wide angles also show us options, more of what lies ahead and the dangers we may not see when zeroed in with that awesome 300MM mindset.
Oh, and my photographer pal… he took off the telephoto in his mind and realized that there were more wins than losses, and that – in context – he was building something amazing.
Hey… change the lenses in your mind once in a while. It is good for the soul.
And if you have an extra 50MM f1.2L Canon laying around, I am totally willing to take it off your hands. No, seriously, I am.
🙂
