Standard Lenses

I don't much care about the whys and the details of this lens versus that. But since I went to the trouble of calling Ming out yet again, I got to thinking about it.

I shoot a little long almost all the time. Mainly because I love this one lens on this one camera, it's so damn fine, blah blah. But I can rationalize it by remarking that I print small, 6" to 12" on the diagonal, and I put prints in books which I read at 16" to 30", let's say. So "Standard" should be a bit long. It's perspective-accurate, more or less. That really means something like neutral, it doesn't feel weird, it just looks like a picture.

Project I'm fuckin' around with from time to time is about peering out, about hiding and looking out. A little claustrophobic, a little fearful. Turns out the 300mm lens on the crop body with some out of focus crap in the foreground more or less framing the view does a nice job here.

I can't manage wide. Too much crap in the frame, I don't know what to do with it. Same like color, I am just lost.

Anyways, my advice is to know what it looks like to use this lens or that lens, and then think about that when you're trying to figure out how to handle some idea. Don't spend a lot of time on "well, a wide lens emphasizes the foreground more" or whatever, just know what it looks like, and see if that helps to make sense of whatever you're trying to do. A wide lens, a long lens, a standard lens, they all can do 100 different things in terms of your pictures. A wide lens might emphasize this, or distort that, or it might not. The point is that it looks wide.