From the course: Photo Gear Weekly

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Understanding lens compression

Understanding lens compression

From the course: Photo Gear Weekly

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Understanding lens compression

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- In a previous episode, I talked about the concept of lens compression. There is a common notion that when you use a long lens versus a relatively short focal-length lens, that you're compressing the scene. But actually, what causes that compression is a change in your position. If you're using a longer lens, you need to be further away from the subject in order to frame it up the same and that change in position is what's actually compressing the scene. But this also affects not just theory in photography, but composition. Let's take a look at an actual example. So here is a photograph captured on the Brooklyn Bridge in New York City. And you can see that I've set my position so that the lamp appears within the frame of the tower of the bridge. And so I found just the right position. If I change my zoom setting, let's assume that I wanted to get a closer look at that lamp, for example, here, standing in the…

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