How-To
?We took a Tamron SP 90mm F/2.8 Di VC USD lens into the field to shoot everything from close-ups to broad scenics. Your macro isn’t limited to small stuff.
The Face Of The Landscape
In traditional terms, the focal-length range from 80mm to 135mm has been considered ideal for portraits. There’s something about the modest compression that flattens facial perspective while drawing close to lips and eyes. This has changed, to some degree, in more recent years. One, with the advent of sub-frame digital cameras, this focal-length range is cropped by the sensor to act like about 1.5X. Also, it became popular for swimsuit photographers to use as much as 300mm or more for the special effects of soft backgrounds, enlarging sunset backdrops in relation to the subject and more.
Nevertheless, in similar terms, a case can be made that landscapes look best when photographed with this portrait lens range. This is particularly true for landscapes with big features like massive mountains or old-growth trees (Photo 1). The moderate magnification and special compression draw distant subjects closer while rendering them larger in relation to the foreground. The result is a more imposing photograph. Of course, it’s easy to use a wide variety of zooms in the range between 90mm and 135mm, but for our case at hand, we thought it would be novel to make use of the specialty 90mm macro as the less obvious choice. The justifications are these.
You can see the differences in background sharpness between