There are several advantages of using a long lens. By long lens I mean focal lengths in the range of 100mm to 300mm. We are not talking about those expensive telephoto lenses, but the typical zoom lenses that come in as a Kit lens. Of all the advantages of using the long lenses, there are 3 primary usages, they are Obtaining shallow depth of field and Compression Field of View Perspective In the following posts I am going to explain about of them. But let us start with the first advantage of using long lens – Shallow Depth of Field. I will explain about compression in a separate post. This attribute of a long lens (or zoom lens) is not often talked about. Once we understand this concept, we can use this as a tool to our advantage. By the way, please note I an calling them a long lens and not a Zoom lens. If we only think of it as Zoom lens, then it makes you anchored in one place and wanting to zoom everything you see. Most of the times we look at a picture with soft, creamy background and sharp foreground subject and think WOW, that should be a professional lens and say, If only I had that $1000 lens. Well, that is not true. We can get absolutely stunning images using just our kit long lenses. Let me explain you how…. When you compose a picture, be it portrait, landscape, macro or any type of photography, first you will decide what is going to be the primary subject. Then you decide on how much importance you want to give to the subject in your frame i.e how much of your frame will that subject fill in. Once you decide, then compose this picture in your view finder. Take a look at the first picture here. This picture of the rusty nuts on this bridge was primarily taken to demonstrate the use of long lens to obtain a shallow depth of field. The gear i used here is a SONY NEX 6, with a 18-200mm lens. This is not a kit lens. But this can be demonstrated using a 55-200mm kit lens. The point here is not the gear, but the technique....
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