Two-Dimensional

Winchester Road, Southampton

Although I don't do it very often, sometimes I like nothing better than to wander about town with a long zoom lens. The one I own is the "cheap" Fuji XC 50-230mm f/4.5-6.7 (equivalent to 70-300mm in 35mm terms), a lens at which most gear-head photographers would sneer, but its modest specifications enable it to be small(ish) and light, and optically it's absolutely fine. That is, it's good enough for me.

It seems to be a feature of human vision that the brain can isolate items of interest within the whole field captured by the eye, so that something quite tiny, in absolute terms – like, for example, the moon, occupying just half a degree of arc, which (I think) means you could fit 360 of them in the sky, edge to edge, from horizon to horizon – becomes subjectively huge. It's a very good and useful trick, a sort of neurological "digital zoom", but can only be duplicated photographically by actually narrowing the angle of view. With a long lens, you can really concentrate on the lovely, often quite graphical things that tend to happen in the distance where widely separated objects are brought into juxtaposition with each other. A slight movement of the head, or a step sideways, and a whole new combination presents itself. The combination of "foot zoom" and optical zoom is unbeatable, if you tend to like what you see out on the horizon.

Redbridge Hill flats, Southampton

I also like the sense of compression given by a long lens. I enjoy pictures that display a strong two-dimensional sense of design – it's one of the great pleasures of Japanese prints, and the western art inspired by them – and, if you can get the balance of aperture and point of focus right (which, with a long zoom, can be difficult, especially if you're a lazy person who prefers to work in auto-everything mode), the flattened perspective is very two-dimensional. I do wish the camera manufacturers would provide an automatic hyperfocal [1] setting, however, which would simplify getting this balance right. How difficult can it be? I always prefer things to be sharp from front to back: I was annoyed by the soft focus on the rearmost branches in the picture below, for example, as it restores the illusion of three-dimensionality. But then it was taken as dusk was falling at 16:30 at the widest available aperture. I suppose I was lucky to get anything useable at all; with any luck whatever that thing is will still be there the next time I pass by that tree.

The contemporary obsession with shallow depth of field and the quality of the resulting out-of-focus background (so called "bokeh", from the Japanese for "blur") as a marker of "good" photography is mystifying to me. The idea that one would spend hundreds, even thousands of pounds on a big, heavy, "fast" lens to hang on a camera (ideally, one with as big a sensor as possible), merely in order to blur out as much of the background as possible – "just like a professional" – is hilarious. Personally, I much prefer a slow lens, one which isn't pushing the optical envelope. A kit zoom  – the sort that comes bundled with a camera – has always suited me fine. Apart from the benefits in cash outlay, size, and weight, it means you're also always in with a good chance of some decent depth of field. Not least because in Auto mode you're not having to fight some software developer's urge to use, at every opportunity, the biggest, light-greedy, shallow DOF aperture available. A modest f/5.6 will do just fine, thanks.

But I think that's probably quite enough gear-talk for 2019.

Southampton Common

1. "The hyperfocal distance is the closest distance at which a lens can be focused while keeping objects at infinity acceptably sharp. When the lens is focused at this distance, all objects at distances from half of the hyperfocal distance out to infinity will be acceptably sharp."