 How's it, how's it guys? Today's episode is brought to you by Frames Magazine. We need to talk about lenses and specifically what is the best lens for you? Think back to when you last shopped around for a lens. It's more than likely that you thought about, well, I want to take some portraits, so I need to find a portrait lens. One of those long telephoto, do you know the 85s or one of the fives? Or I want to do some wide angle photography landscapes. And you saw primarily about the type of image that you were going to photograph and let that dictate where you went initially in choosing that lens. And then you saw things about build quality and f-stops and all those other technical aspects because lenses are expensive, so I appreciate, you know, you want to think about build quality. But we're overlooking the real aspect of a lens that you should be thinking about before you buy one. Have you ever considered the camera to be an extension of yourself? That you bring it up to your eye and you just take a photo naturally and just feels right? A lot of that comes down to something that John Mayovitz talks about. What's your personality like? Do you want to compress and flatten everything? Use a telephoto. You want to bring things far away, near? Use a telephoto. But if you want to plunge into the stream of the street, if you want to swim in there and be like a fish moving through the crowd, you need a lens that matches your vision. I love that, that idea that you have this symbiosis between the camera and the lens and yourself that the way the camera is seeing the world is fitting your personality. No doubt when you think about your own personality and the lenses that you are drawn towards that feel natural, then you can see how this makes sense. This personality is being conveyed through the camera and it works backwards as well. When you look at a lot of great photographers, especially street photographers, they seem to just have this almost natural instinct to just see a photograph and pick up the camera and it's there. And that's because they are seeing the world in the same way that the lens is seeing it. If you photograph on a 24mm prime or a 50mm, some sort of prime lens for a protracted length of time, you start to see the world naturally like this. But this is only one part of the equation when it comes to choosing the right lens for you. Recently, I was talking about sharpness in photography on the lens and I'll link to that video at the end. And there's some photographs here of animals which I simply adore. They are by a photographer called Peter L. Pedro Cox. They're just wonderful. Such a good example also of photographs that do require a sharp lens. That this is when that detail is put to good use. This looks like a crazy chicken again. There seems to be a theme when we talk about images on frames that there are animals that abuse me. I don't know what it is. Who knows? You know, there's a little duck here. Wack, whack. That's a wonderful thing. It's also wonderful to page through the magazine and see these gorgeous black and white photographs. I love these. These are also, you know, using a lens to isolate, to make the viewer feel that this is like a flat idea that has become a graphic thing, that has gone away from this idea of trying to make a three-dimensional image and it feels somewhat flat. And that's not a disservice to the image. These photographs by Minerva de Veil are absolutely beautiful. So I would encourage you, if you are interested in Frames Magazine, to click on the link in the description box below and there's a 10% discount for you. I left you earlier a little bit on a tenterhook. Didn't I say there was another aspect towards the lenses that you really need to, you know, take into consideration to really impress the most important person in photography. Now, you may not be familiar with the name Roger Deakins, but I am pretty sure you have seen one of his films at some point. The man is a legend and he is, as I mentioned earlier, a criminally underrated resource for photographers. His cinematography has challenged and broken you ground. Think that one shot, take, in the film, 1917. Now he gives us the second part of what we need to make sure that we are choosing the right lens for ourselves. Well, I've got a very strong feeling about lenses and personally, I'm sitting here talking to you and you are filming me from over there on a shoulder and probably a single where I'd rarely do that because I think, you know, the camera was to be, to me, I would shoot singles inside here unless it's through a particular fact and then I'd drop back off and be more observational with a shoulder in. I mean, I think it's a totally different effect to an audience looking at somebody on the end of a 100 millimeter lens as opposed to somebody that's being shot on a 27 close to or 21. So here we are, 32 millimeter or 30 millimeter. It's on a zoom, so sometimes you can't tell what the millimeter is. Anyway, but it's different, right? You know, it's a sense of presence. You're right there with somebody as opposed to being, I think psychologically it's a totally different effect. I mean, it's just the same as your relationship in real life to somebody. I'm sitting this close to you. I'm not seeing you from over there on a long lens, you know, so I don't think we take that into account as much as we should really. That is one of the most important things you're going to hear about photography this year. I guarantee you, right? That is so important to take into consideration that the lens choice that you are going to use is going to influence how the viewer interprets your photograph because the viewer is the most important person in photography. As far as I'm concerned, because they are the ones who decide if your photograph is a success or a failure. How often have you taken photos and you've shown them to somebody? And you've been really impressive. You go, wow, I really, I like this image. And people just kind of go, that's because we haven't done enough as photographers to make them go, wow, to put into their heads a feeling. It's obviously open to individual taste, but the more ability that we have to move emotionally, the viewer, by using our lens choice is correct. By using a lens that fits our personality and it also is conveying the right message. Then we start to be able to have more strings to pull that's like a puppet master kind of thing in making a person interpret your photograph in a certain way. When you look at the cover of this copy of frames, this is a, I think, beautiful image, but it is completely flat. It has no sense of depth to it. And that's why it works because it doesn't have a sense of depth to it. It has a very graphic kind of feel and it makes it feel cold. Makes it feel emotionally cold, despite the fact that there is that red there. This is a photographer who I will touch on in the next episode because it was lying here and I just thought you weren't gonna show it, but it is good. So you need to kind of think about what it is that you want to convey with your photograph. And if you want to find out more about sharpness, if you want to find out more about what I was thinking about sharpness in lenses, check out this video over here. Thank you ever so much and I'll see you again soon.