Quote Originally Posted by Noah A View Post
Or you could just photograph the general crap! The problem is if you shoot with a 75mm lens, the crap in the foreground looks much bigger than the crap in the background.

I think that extreme focal lengths in either direction tend to make things easier for the photographer. Wides tend to provide instant drama, long lenses can isolate the subject and make it easier to make things 'perfect' as Frank said. Of course this is a gross and unfair generalization. There are times when both types of lenses are necessary.

Personally I like the lenses just on either side of normal. My favorite is the 115/120 focal length. It can fit a lot into the frame without overly exaggerating the size relationships of elements within the frame. Likewise a 210 is a bit longer than normal and can work when you just can't get close enough to shoot with the wider lens, but it's not so long that it drastically compresses elements within a scene, and it still can include a lot of context.

The more I shoot 4x5, the more I lean towards selling off all of my extra junk and just sticking to the 115/210 combo.
I like the notion of the 115-210 combo just like a 28/35 and 50 in 35mm are a good combo. Or streamline even more and go with one lens, a 135 or 150 (about like a 40 in 35mm).

I really dislike the distortion of space that the extreme lenses have, both long and wide. Especially ultra-wide. I think it looks a lot better to do two or three shots with the normal lens and stitch if you really want to describe a landscape or scene. The wides always foreshorten everything too much and usually the furthest away subject is the most interesting - but the wide makes it smaller.

The longer lenses flatten the subjects too much I think. It makes it easier to get depth of field related separation but you lose the sense of roundness and mass. I know that sounds like art bullshit but it's what I see.

So the closer to normal lenses feel more like the focal length and field of our eyes, the pictures have a sense of reality. But maybe if you packed 20 miles up a mountain trail to capture an alpine lake you want to distort it with a 75mm so you can get everything in the shot, and that's cool too, I understand.