The Short Telephoto – My Preferred Carry-Everywhere Lens

It’s been a little while since I really began to realise just how much more I favour I hold for a short telephoto lens. Over last summer though it went from being a vague preference to a particularly sticky habit and I found myself almost exclusively shooting an 85mm. In fact, I can trace this longer-lens-appreciation back quite a long way. I have for a long time found composition easier with a tighter frame. It’s just taken me a while to realise to what degree this preference has become a part of my photography.

To me, it feels almost like objective fact that short telephoto lenses are easier to frame with. Lenses wider than normal can take a bit more thinking to create an interesting image, and with anything wider than 28mm the sense of expanded perspective can make framing specifically difficult. If I try to shoot an ultra wide as a carry-everywhere, I can, and do, get shots I’m happy with, but too often I can find myself with big areas of empty stretched foreground or a background that sits too far away from the subject. Moving closer to the subject to remove the empty space doesn’t help either as perspective distortion starts to impact the subject. With a longer lens, the perspective compression has the opposite effect. With very long lenses it’s nigh on impossible to capture any foreground at all, and the background can appear very close to the subject. But, composing an image is arguably more simple as the tighter framing helps remove superfluous elements.

Of course, very long lenses can be just as hard to use for everyday purposes as ultra-wide angle lenses as including any context at all within the frame becomes more difficult. But, just as a moderately wide 35mm lens gives some of the advantages of a wide angle lens without bringing too many of the disadvantages, a short tele such as an 85mm can bring some of the benefits of a longer lens without being so long that the disadvantages have an impact too often.

Oddly – at least to me – 35mm lenses are arguably way more popular than 85s. I do have a feeling that I know why though. A while ago now – probably something like 15 years I’d guess – I had a load of Nikon cameras and was shooting a lot of film as part of my hobby as a photographer. I had a fair few lenses too, though I can’t remember exactly what I had as many of them are a long time sold. I did have a longer Nikon manual focus lens though – I think it might have been the 100mm series-e. Whatever it was, I went out one day with a mate to teach him some of the basics of photography. I’d loaned him one of my manual Nikon cameras and, I guess, whatever Nikon manual focus 50mm I had at the time. I’d put the longer lens on my camera deciding that I would challenge myself to use it exclusively. To my surprise, faced with no choice to shoot the longer lens, I actually found it really easy to work with. But, whilst I remember being aware of this positive experience, I can also remember feeling that despite it being easier, I was worried that given more frequent adoption of a longer lens, I would eventually be faced with the issue of not being able to get everything into the frame. That mindset turned out to be quite a difficult one to shake, and I’m certain I’m not the only one that’s been down that particular cognitive road.

I think it just comes down to the idea that with a 35mm, even if it’s slightly too wide, at least it will be possible to capture everything, or at very least more of the subject. That is to say, the 35mm field of view seems to offer a more versatile compromise as a carry-everywhere solution. And compromise is probably the operative word here, as seems to me that issue of not being able to get everything into the frame that’s perceived with longer lenses is just more of a pervasive concern than whatever issues people might have around the compromises attributed to shooting a 35mm.

In fact, over the years I’ve only really come across one commonly mentioned concern with the 35mm lens as a focal length, and that’s the idea that it’s not quite wide enough, or tight enough, to be useful. But, if you turn that idea on its head, you’re left with a lens that’s neither too wide or too tight. Which is, I guess, why it’s so much more popular as a focal length when compared to short tele lenses such as an 85mm.

I think I’ve previously bought into that consensus too, as despite so often loving my results from a short tele lens it’s also only been relatively recently that I’ve started to realise just how much of a fallacy the issue of not being able to get everything in to the frame is for me. In fact, despite very regularly shooting short telephoto lenses over the years – and always being enamoured with the results – it wasn’t really until I took my now-sold Pentax 77mm on holiday with me a few years ago did I realise just how much favour I held for the short tele, and indeed how much I would shoot one even when I had the option for a wider lens available to me. I took the 77mm and the 43mm and hardly used the 43mm at all.

A part of this, I think, is just how close – but at the same time subtlety different – a short tele is to a normal lens. If you read the review of the 77mm you’ll find the first handful of paragraphs to very much amount to the beginnings of the opinion I now hold. In fact, I make one particular comment that feels especially relevant here. To quote myself, “The more I used it though, the more it felt closer to a normal field of view.” I said that when comparing the 77mm to the 85mm Zeiss Batis lens I was (and still am) used to shooting a lot for work. What hadn’t occurred to me at the time was that this is also exactly how I feel about an 85mm lens too. Once mounted on the camera and up to my eye, I somehow feel like I barely notice the framing as being all that much tighter than a 50mm, but at the same time I find it easier compose, easier to isolate a subject, and easier to tell a story.

Of course it’s true that I sometimes need to take an extra couple of steps backwards for some shots, but what’s more relevant to the conversation here is that I have found that I less often have a need to take a few steps forward. And actually for all this waffle that’s all this really comes down to for me. With a short tele – probably anything between 60-90mm – I more often find myself at the right distance to get the shot I have in my head. Perhaps that’s the crux of all this. Maybe a short tele is just the right lens for me. Maybe my photographic eye just sees in that sort of framing more frequently than with any other field of view. Or maybe it’s just a preference I’ve developed through growing use and a personal subjective appreciation for the aesthetics of the results. I don’t suppose it matters either way, what does matter is me getting results I’m happy with, and more often than not – for the time being at least – it’s a short tele lens that gets me there.

Here’s some images from a variety of short tele lenses that I’ve really enjoyed shooting with

You might note that the last 3 images were taken with the Nikon 85mm 1.8 AFD – this lens is very possibly my favourite lens at the moment. I intend to review it at some point soon…

Thanks for reading

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