Making Photographs With A Medium Telephoto Lens

Making Photographs With A Medium Telephoto Lens

by William Lulow

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. 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. Now you can create the same types of images with a zoom lens. Just remember that it doesn’t have to be racked out to it’s maximum focal length all the time. My other favorite medium telephoto is the 135mm f/2.

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 really are. 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.

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 a handy chart that illustrates this:

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
• Subjects where a tripod is not necessary

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