Perspective

Thom Hogan (page at right) put together a string of posts he calls "you week." The page itself is fairly long, but his commentary is well worth reading. He gave an assignment: take a fixed lens, set your camera to manual focus/exposure, and go shoot. He comments on a few reactions:

• You discovered that your pictures looked different. Using only one focal length tends to make you move in order to frame your shot. Moving to frame changes your perspective. When you start changing perspective between shots you get pictures that leave differing impressions of foreground and background relationships. Heard about the 3D craze going around Hollywood? Well, you just discovered 2D. All good. You need more practice, though. Take two primes of different focal length and start exploring moving in relationship to your subject.

This is a really interesting comment, because it demonstrates so clearly what makes primes an interesting tool: perspective. Perspective is influenced by both the focal length and distance to the subject. Framing the subject in the same space using two different focal lengths requires moving back and forth—and it represents things much differently.



One of the first places I went when I first got the d40 and the 50mm prime was a cemetery at a local church. I snapped a few pictures with the 50 and my 18-55mm kit lens. Here's a perspective difference:

18mm, 1/4000s @ f/4, 18-55mm f/3.5–5.6, ISO 200

Here I've used the wide end of the focal range, 18mm, to capture five headstones.

50mm, 1/4000s @ f/3, ISO 200

Here I've used the 50mm to grab four of them. If I had been thinking, I would've tried to get all five (probably there was some other obstruction in the way) or adjusted the previous shot to get only four.

You can see that the longer focal length draws the background much closer to the subject (the headstones) and results in a substantially different image. Which is better I'll leave up to you.


I would highly recommend looking at Thom's page and working through the assignment. His comments on metering versus manually metering are apropos my post on white balance and lighting.

What he wrote made me pretty happy for having gotten two cheap primes, the 50 and the 24 AI-S. While I'm not very good at composition, simply using the lenses has helped me a great deal. Manual focus, manual metering, zooming with your feet...in the hands of someone a bit more artistic, I suspect the lessons would have produced a better photographer.