Day 5: Lens selection, Selecting out the composition and compressing the field.

The lens you choose has a great deal for how you render a photograph and it is very true even with flower photography. The first and go to lens for most people thinking about photographing a flower would often be a macro lens. It is true a macro lens does allow you to get close and bring in all the intimate detail of a bloom but digging out a telephoto may allow new options to compose and draw out you vision.

I enjoy the fact a telephoto or telephoto zoom lens allows me to step back from a subject and reach in close at the same time, but there are other properties about these powerhouse lenses I enjoy more. When leading photo trips I work to get my travelers to practice isolating what in a scene really attracts or catches their eye. I find a using a telephoto to be a good way from an the image maker to reach for the isolated view and extract out what it is catching the eye. This is a great way to remove any elements of a scene that distract from what you are attempting to portray. I also enjoy the fact that longer lenses tend to compress the field of view. Telephoto compression is the ability of a longer lens to bring the foreground into a closer plane with the back ground, compressing the image and flattening it out. I often catch myself saying things like," telephoto compression takes a three dimensional world down to a two dimensional world, while I am leading my photo trips." The longer lenses will not really help with adding depth of field but the compression will help with separation of your subject from the back ground. 

Tulip field

In this example of the tulips the 300mm perspective smashes the flowers down to a tighter plane creating a much more dense composition of color and pattern.  

Tulip timeTelephoto flower photography.