For S3 users: zoom or wide?

[DirePenguin]

Just a quick question for the many S3 users on the forum: when you are out taking pictures, do you find yourself spending more time at the long end of the zoom or at the wide angle end?

[Turn]

if I want shallow focus then I zoom
if I want whole view then I use wide.
as you can see in my deviantart, I stick to wide, I funny enough love shallow focus just that I can't pull it off well.

[LeeSC]

I don't know if this is technically accurate or not, but I once had a pro photographer tell me that all shots should be taken with a little zoom. Never use the "wide angle", especially with people.

His direction was to compose your shot and then zoom a bit. Alledgedly, this helps with "the camera adds 20 lbs" distortion. Like I said, I don't know if it is true or not and I have never compared photos to see.

I got into the habit of doing this and now it is just second nature.

[downtrodden]

It is technically true, If you're at the wide end of the zoom and compose a portrait, you have to get closer to the person, this will mean for example, their nose is a lot closer to the camera than say the yes... it will cause distortions the nose may look big.. the head may look huge on the shoulders etc. Also, if you go half way down the zoom you'll have a much better chance of getting that beautiful background blur. Don't ask me to explain the science invlved but i once did a post in this forum to illustrate this fact, with a mannaquinn and an A620 and S3 and both cameras had the same results.

I rarely use full wide.

[gslusher]

I don't know if this is technically accurate or not, but I once had a pro photographer tell me that all shots should be taken with a little zoom. Never use the "wide angle", especially with people.

His direction was to compose your shot and then zoom a bit. Alledgedly, this helps with "the camera adds 20 lbs" distortion. Like I said, I don't know if it is true or not and I have never compared photos to see.

I got into the habit of doing this and now it is just second nature.

It's not the focal length that counts. It's HOW CLOSE you are to the person. Perspective does NOT depend upon the focal length--only on the distance. Further away, objects look flatter, as the variation in their depth is a smaller percentage of the distance. Focal length controls field of view (angle), which translates into "magnification." (At longer focal lengths, a narrower part of the visible area is cast onto the film/sensor, making the image appear magnified.)

What perspective of people's faces looks natural depends, in part, upon the culture. Some cultures (much of US, Canada, UK, Germany, etc.) tend to converse at 6-8 feet apart, so that looks like a "normal" perspective. Some other cultures tend to converse only 3-4 feet apart, so that looks "normal" to them.

If you want to take pictures of people's faces, you typically want to fill the frame with the face/head/shoulders, etc. If you use, say, a 28 mm equivalent lens, you will have to get very close to the person, giving a perspective that look odd to people who are not comfortable being that close to someone. By using a longer focal length, the photographer must back away to a greater distance, giving a flatter perspective that may seem more normal to the viewer. In 35mm photography, the "standard" lenses for shooting headshots of people are 85mm and 105mm. It wasn't by accident that most SLR manufacturers make fast (f/2.0 or so) 85mm lenses--they are great for indoor portrait shots.

You can see this by looking at yourself in a mirror. (Remember that the image in the mirror is at double the distance you are from the mirror.)

Another thing to remember is that our brains compensate for perspective, to an extent. We use binocular vision to detect the distance to an object (more accurate at close distances) and our brains adjust the image we see to fit what we expect. When we look at a photo, we don't have the cue as to the distance, so we

I have taken thousands of photos of horses and have helped a lot of beginners. Many make the mistake of taking a picture of the horse's head from in front, at a fairly close distance. They are surprised that the horse's nose looms out at them in the photo. In real life, their brains compensate. An experiment that helps to show this is to have them shut their eyes, then move them (or the horse) so that they are 2-3 feet away from the nose. If they open their eyes, for a split second, they will "see" the same effect as the photo, before their brains have time to compensate. Some of them even recoil at the sight, a natural reflex.

If you want to prove that focal length has nothing to do with perspective, take a photo at wide angle. Open the image in your favorite viewer or editor and zoom in and out on the image. That is **EXACTLY** the same effect as using the zoom on your camera, as far as perspective goes.

So, your photographer friend was only partly right. You should zoom FIRST, then compose the shot. In reality, choose your DISTANCE first, then zoom and compose your shot. For shooting people, stay at least 6-8 feet away, preferably a bit further. For shooting horses' heads from in front, get at least 10 ft away. The focus distance on the one below is 3.01m = 9.9 ft and was not directly in front of the horse's face.

http://homepage.mac.com/gslusher/.Pictures/NoName_stall1.jpg

[Visual Reality]

Depends...I took the majority of my 4gb card in around 10-12x zoom at the Zoo yesterday, mostly animal shots. Not much there that's good for wide angle shots. For scenery, the opposite is true.

[griptape]

As someone whose main subject is a 3 year old, outdoors tends to be at around 6x, and indoors tends to be at around 2x. I've never found myself wishing I could fit a larger amount of dirt and rocks/trees (wide angle) into a picture.

[jonalta]

I am not actually sure which mode (wide or tele) I prefer.
But a quick browse at some of my shots, I found that I use TELE more than WIDE. I would estimate my shots to be about 70% TELE, 10% WIDE, 20% in between.