I live on an acreage 8 miles from a town of about 25,000 people and a few miles from a whole lot of wilderness. I love the physical beauty of the area and am primarily interested in landscape photography.

I am interested in lenses. I watch for new releases, I view YouTube reviews and read reviews on many sites. What I have noticed is that the bulk of the offerings there days tend in one direction - high speed wide angle lenses, be they fixed primes or zooms. These are of little interest to me. I have several slower wide primes, and thought they are excellent optically I rarely use them. On my APS-C Sony A6000, I mostly shoot with lenses 60 mm and longer, with also some work using a 30 mm Sigma.

So am I out of step with the rest of the world? The answer is obvious - of course I am. But then I have been most of my life on most things, so I am used to that.

Anyhow, I finally figured out where I am out of synch. And here is my epiphany: Most of the current photography world is geared towards city living and the urban experience. So. Photographers use wide angle lenses to achieve a feeling of room in a crowded environment. "Bokeh" - that term derived from the Japanese that means "$500 more" - is valuable because it tends to isolate a subject from the people around the subject. And to get decent bokeh from a wide angle lens in daylight you need large apertures. Again, shooting in low light levels is primarily an urban thing. If it is dark, there is some semblance of visual privacy from the hordes around the subject. Privacy, space, peace - these are the attributes so missing from the urban scene.

Longer lenses are rarely used; they compress too many people and too much background in an urban setting. Urban photographers are trying to find sanity in the urban rat-race, and of course that ever elusive element: "Cool".

My observation is that photographers who live away from the urban sprawl tend to use longer lenses, since the above imperatives do not rule. Their pictures reflect a slower and more peaceful life; scenics, sunsets, wildlife.

What I find personally unfortunate is that the lens makers are all scrambling to support the urban photographer with high speed wide angle ex pensive glass. I would love to see some really good longer lenses - f3.5 or higher, but super sharp and not weighing very much. And not costing more than a transoceanic business class ticket.

My hope is that if someone at a lens maker would become aware of this dichotomy, they might consider offering a line along the lines I wish for.

Obviously I have tried to reduce a complex subject in a simplistic argument, but I do believe I have hit on something that is real.

I hope any comments to this topic will remain civil and constructive.

Cheers

Bob Locher

I was hoping Gene and others would not start up, and I am not going to bother after this final post:
For the sake of new photographers who might wonder why a particular photo looks (excuse the technical jargon here) goofy, check your lens. Any lens other than "normal" does not "see" the way we normally do.
For others who want to actually look and verify what is true rather than be faithful to someone's dogma, a simple experiment. Shoot the same scene (a city street is the best example) from the same place using a wide angle, normal, and telephoto lens. If you can't see the difference in linear perspective, stack them in an editing program, each at low opacity, and just TRY to make them line up without distorting (you will have to zoom in on the normal and wide photos).

Seeing is believing, facts do not care about beliefs.