I love the season of flowering trees; sadly, in the northeast, the season only lasts maybe six weeks.
Ornamental flowering trees are commonly planted in many different spaces ranging from residential gardens to corporate office parks. One category that commonly hosts plantings of beautiful trees is cemeteries. While it may seem odd to some people, I’ve seen people of all sorts and ages strolling through cemeteries, even having a picnic. Last weekend, I visited a cemetery in Wakefield. Although the crabapple trees had all dropped their colorful petals, I counted more than two dozen dogwood trees in bloom.
From that short excursion, I wanted to share a comparison of two images of the same tree but photographed with wide-angle lens and a telephoto lens. There are a few reasons why you might choose to use one or the other. When in doubt, shoot them both.
The first reason you might choose a telephoto lens is because you can’t get close enough to your subject. I personally encountered that scenario a couple weeks ago, stopping to photograph cherry trees in bloom at a cemetery where the gates were locked. I photographed from outside the fence using a 100mm lens.
The second reason you might choose to use a telephoto lens is to control the background. The narrow field of view may enable you to exclude elements from the background. And a wide-angle lens can include more background, for more environmental context. In the two photos I’ve shared here, both the telephoto and the wide-angle image do show the environment context, but a telephoto also allowed me to exclude the tombstones entirely.
A third reason to choose either telephoto or wide-angle is depth perception. Wide-angle lenses commonly exaggerate distance; multiple subjects in the photograph appear to be farther apart, compared to using a longer/telephoto focal length. Conversely, telephoto lenses tend to compress distance, making multiple subjects (at different distances from the camera) appear closer together.
Lastly, when you have multiple subjects at very different distances, a telephoto lens combined with a small aperture may allow blurring the background – if that’s the effect you’re seeking to create. Both the images here employ an aperture about f\4.5.
