Long focal length's by which I mean a hundred millimetres or more a five hundred or a
thousand etcetera,
now they do the obvious of making something that's a long way off come
much closer and fill up the frame, this is used extensively by wildlife photographers and
sports photographers and the press,
but there's also a bit more to it than that
let's just take a look at that zoom once again,
now I'm sitting in the middle of your picture like a little tiny pea, and as I'm
getting bigger and bigger and filling the frame, so this rock is sneaking up
behind me
and it's starting to get bigger too, it now looks as though it's right smack
behind me, even the top of it has been cut off.
But how could you use that technique in your photography to take better pictures?
You see these stones, they're all spread out off the hill side and the evening light looks
amazing,
but it's kind of a flat
open kind of a shot,
if i shoot something from here
it's well it looks okay but it's a load of old nothing,
now using this compressing the way that stone came up behind me,
we can do it with these stones themselves, now you see this
big
stone that's about here,
we're gonna use that
as the foreground of the shot, that's going to be our focus
and we're going to do it by using a long focal length, so I'm gonna set this out to
two hundred and seventy-five millimetres.
Now i want to get down low
over here,
I've gotta be a long way from the stones this is about not being lazy,
let's get up close to something and zoom around and then go click,
set the focal length according to what you want from the picture
and then move yourself away from the subject.
I'm a long way from that stone.
Now I'm gonna get down low
because i want to get a bit of this grass just looking through it,
and I want to,
look at that,
beautiful
evening light.
Just kissing the stones, we've got all the stones the shot,
if I was to try to do that same shot
with a wide lens and get up close to the stone
look at this,
it's just, there's nothing to it is there?
the stones big and it's powerful and it's dramatic, but we've lost all the others
behind it, they're hidden because the wide lens is opening up
the space where is the narrow lens the long lens is closing it in again.
There's another thing you can do with a long lens too.
A long focal length
inherently has a shallow depth of field,
a wide short lens has lot's and lot's of depth of field, the longer you get
the shallower the depth of field you have, that's the least amount of picture from
front to back
that will be sharp.
Now this is incredibly useful in portraits and things like that because you
can make a lovely blurry background, so using
the long lens
and that compressing in bringing up of rocks thing I'm going to shoot a portrait of Nat
here and have a really nice soft gentle
sort of background that's pretty good actually Nat
just kind of like you are,
put your chin down just a bit,
that's cool,
you look like you're gonna cry though.
So sorry, just let your shoulders relax a bit,
that's it tilt your head towards the rock a bit,
that's better.
That's great stuff.
So you see how the rock in the background
has gone completely soft and fuzzy and Natasha is absolutely the subject of the
photograph because she's nice and crisp and sharp.
By using a long focal lens
with a wide aperture
that's a low f number like f five point six, f four, f two point eight
if you can afford a lens with that wide an aperture, which is fantastic for this.
Portraits, long lenses they work brilliantly,
there's just one more thing I want to show you.
Close-ups.
Provided your long lens will focus in close enough
and on this one i can get in to
point four nine of a metre that is one point six feet, that's pretty close,
that's only about
that far away from the front of the lens.
Provided you can focus close enough
you can do some beautiful macro close-up photography with a long lens, now the
purest will say you really need to use a macro lens,
I say I don't care as long as I get the image that I want and It looks great then who cares
what lens you've used.
Now then, this stuff here
I believe it's called cow slip, I grew up in the country and I'm terrible plant
ignorant, so
if i've got that wrong
please don't email in.
Now if I zoom that lens
to it's longest setting, I'm going to two hundred and seventy millimetres,
I'm gonna focus as close as I can
often the best way of doing this is to use manual focus
and set the focus to its closest distance so that it's already there
then you get the focus
by looking through the view finder and
moving yourself
backwards and forwards
in till what you want to take a picture of
comes sharp, here we go, look at that
fantastic, let's get one in the middle.
Just moving up and down, it's not the best because it's very tricky on a day like today, there's a slight breeze,
and that makes the plant wobble around a little bit and
every time it moved it moves itself out of focus because your depth of field
like this has got,
very very small indeed.
let's take one from a bit further back, look at that, that's beautiful. Notice I'm shooting
into the light
as a posed to the light over my shoulder,
it looks so much nicer,
So look at those, aren't
they gorgeous, even light on the cow slip
or whatever it may be.
Long lenses are very very versatile, you can shoot portraits with them, you can
make soft background's with them, you can move the environment around and make
things come up sneaking behind them,
what more could you ask from something to stick on the front of your camera