Honestly, I don't spend that much time thinking about my focal length for food photography. I hate when I hear photography advice given as an absolute, so I always want to point out that it's ultimately a creative endeavor. You can use distortion in food photography. There's no rule against it.  If an ultra-wide angle lens seems intriguing, give it a try. It's easy enough to rent a lens for a day or two.

Lens DistortionMod APK

I often use the Zeiss 15mm for landscapes. It stretches out the foreground. Also, this is unrelated to distortion, but the Zeiss color rendition is my favorite. The 15mm Zeiss for Canon is a complete pain in the ass. It's heavy. It's bulky. It doesn't autofocus, but the colors are just insanely lovely. I have been half tempted to scoop up the 35mm Zeiss f/1.4 for Canon, but it feels a little profligate.

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Las Aberraciones son un tipo de criatura que tocaron o fueron creadas por seres extraplanares o emanaciones creadas de la Gran Oscuridad, siendo considerados alienigenas para otros planos de existencia como el Plano Material y los Planos Exteriores

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For years I predominately used a 35mm prime lens. It’s hard to notice lens distortion when you’re only using one lens. These days I have a relatively wide range of lenses and when I switch between them frequently, I really notice the distortion and compression from each lens. I think there’s always a time and place for distortion and compression in photography if used thoughtfully.

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It drives me a little crazy when I hear photographers advise people against using anything wider than a 35mm. Food can take lens distortion pretty well. There aren’t that many straight lines in food photography, so you have a lot of wiggle room. While I rarely use my Zeiss 15mm for food photography, I occasionally use the 24mm focal length with my Canon 24-70. The wider focal lengths work particularly well for tablescapes.

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With landscapes and cityscapes, I often enjoy using the extremes of lens distortion and compression to create a dramatic image. With expansive open landscapes, using a 15mm makes them feel even more intensely open. When I want to create an image that feels like a skyline is looming over someone, I tend to use a much higher focal length to compress the image.

With photography, there are many reasons that images don’t quite match reality. First, there’s the aperture which creates bokeh. We don’t see things in the world with bokeh. There’s also editing, which allows you to morph an image in a way that can be entirely different from reality. On the subtler end, there’s lens distortion and compression. What lens you’re using will impact the overall distortion or compression on your final image. Depending on your lens and focal length, that distortion can be almost imperceptible or highly noticeable.

For example, it's tough to get a shot of the skyline looking so close to the Lincoln Park honeycomb structure without the compression of a zoom lens.

Before you can purposefully use lens distortion or compression, you need to be able to notice it. I recommend setting up an item to shoot or a location and shooting it from the same spot with a range of the focal lens. Even knowing about lens distortion, I was shocked to see how drastically different something can look depending on the lens and focal length I used.

Las aberraciones tienen anatomias bizarras, habilidades extrañas pensamientos alienigenas y casi imposibles de comprender

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I shot this with a focal length of 50mm. Now that I've gone on and on about the Zeiss color rendition, I am very tempted to complain about the blues and greens in this image. Anyway, there's little overall distortion in this image. It's good if accuracy is your primary goal.

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When I was starting, I remember reading some rant about how photography enthusiasts always ask about lenses they should use and that a professional would know. At the time, I didn't know what lens to use in what situation, but the rant made me feel like I shouldn't ask or experiment. Now that seems a bit absurd to me. I know how to do certain things very well, but there are a lot of cameras and lenses out there. I don't know how to use every piece of photography equipment ever made. It's helpful to understand distortion and compression as concepts, experiment with lenses, and ask questions along the way.

Lens distortionAPK

A camera lens doesn't precisely reflect the world as you see it. If you've ever heard that a camera can add 10 pounds, that's sort of true. Though a camera lens can also stretch you out and distort you. For me, lens distortion has always been most apparent in photos of myself. The images are always just a bit off. Photography is not a direct copy of what you see. This has been one of those things that I’ve intuitively understood but never really thought about until recently.

One afternoon, I set up my camera and photographed myself starting from a 15mm focal length up to a 400mm focal length. When I was putting together the final lens distortion GIFS, I felt like I had spent an afternoon staring at a funhouse mirror.

I shot this image at a 100mm focal length, and it's not the best, but it's here to make a point, not to look pretty. When I was starting, I always just wanted to know what the "best" lens is, and it took me a while to understand that it entirely depends on what I'm trying to accomplish. The zoom is great if I want to compress something and give the impression that things are closer together than they are or if I need the zoom (like while on safari, which is literally what I bought this lens for way back in 2015).

Some photographers I know use wider-angle lenses to slim or lengthen their subjects. Classically, many portrait photographers use 50mm lenses. After all, they’re considered the closest to reality or 80mm lenses because they create excellent bokeh.

These days, I've noticed a lot of fashion bloggers gravitating to wider-angle lenses. I personally tend to photograph most people with a 35mm focal length. Personally, I think the 35mm is a bit more flattering than a 50mm or 80mm but it doesn't distort the subject so much.

Below, all images were taken from the same spot at an aperture of 5.6. They were all edited precisely the same way. Their differences are entirely due to lens choice.