This page was translated by AI. Please be forgiving of any mistakes.
‹ Photo Notes · 10 září, 2013
You know how it is. A half-naked model in front of the lens – but which one? You wander helplessly over your awesome photo arsenal, which you dreamed about for years and saved for for further years (and keep saving, because there are never enough good lenses). Will a wide one be better, a standard, or a medium-long one? And what about something really long?
There is beauty in simplicity, and since I photograph beauty, I photograph simply. In the vast majority of cases I make do with a focal length around 30 mm – to be more precise, let’s say from 28 to 35 mm. Sometimes I feel like it, have a reason, a period (right now) when I get into playing with shorter focal lengths – at the moment I’m limited to 17 mm, which is an extremely wide and distorting focal length, but I’m eyeing 14 mm. Sometimes I shoot with the standard fifty and only occasionally reach for 85 mm. Anything longer I use only exceptionally, when I have a real reason (or when I had an unreasonable, fortunately short period – at that time I even got a Sigma 600 mm).
Why do I avoid telephoto lenses?
I don’t avoid them, in fact I love long lenses, but I dare say that for my genre and for photographing models in general they aren’t suitable unless we have a well-founded reason to use them. There are two reasons, and the first is purely technical.
A long focal length distorts
A word in a brawl? Sure. If we understand 50 mm as the basic lens, because both in angle of view and in the rendering of perspective it most resembles what our eye sees, then anything shorter or longer distorts the reality we are used to.
Lenses with a short focal length (wide-angles) emphasize perspective. Compared with the basic glass (50 mm) they make everything smaller and push it away. When I want the model to be the same size, I must go closer. That brings the model closer, but increases the distance of everything behind her and creates a large perspective on her body too. Depending on how short a focal length we use and at what angle we approach the model, we can make big or small heads, long-legged legs, huge noses and so on. With a reasonably short focal length and reasonable use we can gently shape the body in a way that won’t look exaggerated, but interesting. That is why shooting at 28 to 35 mm is interesting for me. I can lengthen legs, shrink a bottom, enlarge a bust, in short create perfect proportions without the viewer feeling cheated. In fact he is cheated. And without Photoshop.
Long lenses (over 50 mm), by contrast, compress perspective. Everything is closer, bigger and flatter. The last two words are essential – an advantage of flattening is, for instance, a smaller nose. Conversely, I consider it a disadvantage that perspective is compressed in the area of the bust and shoulders too. With a short focal length I get a large bosom and narrow shoulders. With a long lens the bust shrinks and the shoulders grow. Put simply, a long lens adds kilos and turns tiny girls into a bit of a wardrobe. A bit, but these minimal differences make up the overall impression.
My second reason for not using long lenses concerns the emotional side of photography.
With a long lens I lose contact
A few days ago someone wrote to me that I don’t work with images but with meanings (nice, I’m happy to identify with that, thank you:). For that to be so, I must have contact with the model. My shooting takes the form of an intimate dialogue and in the photographs it is (I hope) visible. A long lens, however, pushes me 5 or even 20 metres away from the model and that changes the character of what I photograph.
When I photographed Tereza on the Charles Bridge, I was about 5 metres from her and it had nothing to do with dialogue anymore; I merely shouted instructions at her, and in front of me I had no partner for a dialogue but „only“ a scene – the panorama of Hradčany, the Charles Bridge and a nude model standing on it. It was even more noticeable once on the Palacký Bridge, where with a focal length of 200 mm I was perhaps 20 or 30 metres from the model; with the city traffic it made no sense even to shout instructions.
Note: I’m now thinking about a 14mm lens and Lída is teasing me that I want it so I can sniff the models 🙂
Want to learn more? Visit a nude photography workshop.