Medium Telephoto Lenses

Note: Here is the article on medium telephoto lenses published a while ago, with some updates.

Medium Telephoto Lenses

by William Lulow

There is a reason that most photographers have an arsenal of lenses at their disposal for various photographic situations. Some may prefer variable focus, or zoom lenses, but my preferences always ran to the primes. When you were trained on view cameras and those beautiful Zeiss lenses, it was hard to get serious about zooms. They always seemed like a cheap way to avoid carrying many lenses, and some were actually fairly expensive. Whenever I do almost any kind of shoot where I might need a number of lenses with me, they are stored in a good camera bag:

As I have said, when I am touring and just sightseeing, I usually carry only two lenses: the 20mm wide angle and the medium telephoto 85mm.

Medium telephoto lenses are the best lenses to use for portraits. They include lenses in the 80mm to 135mm range. These lenses cover a field of view of roughly 20 to 25 degrees.  Telephoto lenses to several things:

• They make the field of view narrow than normal or wide angle lenses
• They tend to compress distances
• They bring objects closer and make them appear bigger
• They are heavier to carry and hold
• They tend to give portraits more of a “normal” look
• They cut down on depth-of-field

The reason these lenses are good for portraits is that they compress distances just enough to make faces appear more normal in proportion. They will also tend to keep backgrounds out of focus enough to concentrate the viewer’s attention on the subject’s face. Since these lenses are often heavier than the normal or wide angle lenses, it is often useful to use a tripod to keep them steady.

Examples of telephoto lenses for 35mm cameras (digital single-lens reflexes) would be:

• 85mm
• 100mm
• 135mm
• 150mm

One of the other properties of these medium telephoto lenses is that they allow the photographer to be further away from their subjects. This can be helpful when you want to capture more candid shots. But it is also useful in the studio. When I shoot studio portraits, I usually use my 85mm f/1.8 lens. Even though I rarely use it wide open, it is a great portrait lens because of its speed. As a matter of fact, when I use it in the studio, my usual setting is f/11 at 1/100^th of a second with my studio flash units. If I shoot outdoors, depending on the ambient light, my setting is usually f/4 or f/5.6 at 1/100^th of a second.

Because of the greater distance allowed in order to fill the frame, the subject’s facial features are rendered more in proportion to what they would be with a shorter lens. There is no distortion as there would be in a wide-angle lens if you were to fill the frame with only the subject’s face, say. The medium telephoto allows you to make a larger image of just the person’s head and shoulders without getting physically closer.

In portraiture, a subject’s face is said to be in proportion when the three elements of the face (chin-to-bottom of nose, bottom-of-nose to eyebrows and eyebrows-to-top of forehead) are roughly equal. Here is an illustration of these:

So, medium telephoto lenses work well for the following types of photographs:

• Action shots of subjects not too far away
• Portraits, either outside or in the studio
• Subjects that don’t require the photographer to be at a great distance
• Candid shots where the subject(s) isn’t aware of being photographed
• When you wish to fill the frame with head and shoulders

Here are some examples of shots taken with medium telephoto lenses:

For each of these images a medium telephoto lens was used. For these types of portraits, a lens of this type works best. In a portrait session where you are photographing only one person, these lenses provide the right amount of intimacy between photographer and subject, yet you don’t have to be that close tot the subject physically in the studio. Here’s a shot made with a medium telephoto that’s not a portrait:

For this shot, I wanted to include the child large enough to get a clear image. Sometimes you cannot get close enough physically to make the image you want. So this is when to use the slightly longer (medium telephoto) lens.

These lenses allow the photographer to fill more of the frame with the subject without encroaching on the subject’s territory, shall we say. They allow you to make a larger image of a subject that is a little distance away, in addition to rendering subjects more proportional.

Medium range telephotos will allow you to fill the frame without getting too close. Long telephotos, as I will explain in the next article, sometimes restrict the angle of view of a scene too much. Here’s another kind of image for which medium range telephoto lenses excel:

This picture of Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil was made from a neighboring hilltop. A wide angle lens would have been too short and would have encompassed more of the landscape than I wanted to include. With a medium telephoto, I was able to make the composition I wanted without including too much of the scene.

Again, each lens has things it does well and others for which it would be inappropriate. The same holds true for the new iteration of iPhones which have various different lens settings you can use. As photographers, we need to think more about just what kinds of compositions we intend to make.