How Lens Choice Affects Your Background

You’ve heard me talk about lens compression and how flattering that is for portraits, but lens compression actually affects more than people’s faces—it affects how your background is rendered in the shot. For example, when you use a wide-angle lens—let’s say a 24mm lens (the shot you see above left)—it pushes the scene away, so the background behind your subject looks farther away in the photo than it actually is in real life. That’s great when you want to make a scene look big and epic—you’re making a scene look bigger than it really is. Now, if you were to change lenses to a long telephoto or zoom lens (like I did here, where I switched to a 70–200mm), and not change any of your camera settings, and you zoomed in tight on your subject, the background would not only appear out of focus, it would appear much, much closer to your subject, like it was right behind them (like you see above right). So, think about this: When you reach into your bag to choose a lens, you’re actually making a big composition decision. You’re pretty much deciding whether your background will be in focus and farther away from your subject, or out of focus and closer to your subject. Choose wisely, young Padawan.