The difference between a wide-angle photo and a telephoto panorama

Thursday 5 May 2022, 23:23 by Nando Harmsen | 5,421 views | 2 comments

This article was translated from Dutch with the help of AI. Read the original.

A wide-angle lens is perfect for getting a lot of a landscape into the frame. You can also use a telephoto lens and create a panorama of the landscape. Is there a difference, and if so, what is it? I tried it out for you.

Many landscapes are photographed with a wide-angle lens. That is not surprising, because it allows you to get a lot of the landscape into the frame. I will leave aside for now whether that is the right choice for an interesting image.

You can also photograph the same landscape with a telephoto lens. Or rather, a longer focal length, because it does not necessarily have to be a real telephoto lens. After all, 50mm is already a focal length that is more than three times as long as a 16mm focal length. Your angle of view is then more than nine times smaller, three times in length and three times in width.

A fairly simple landscape is perfect for photographing with a telephoto lens. This example can easily be achieved with four vertical shots using a longer focal length.
Do you want to get the same view at 50mm as with a 15mm focal length? Then you need to create a panorama. You can then stitch the images together with software. The question is, does this produce a different photo, or not?

A little test

With the so-called compressing effect of a telephoto lens in mind, you would expect a panorama with a telephoto lens to produce a different photo from a single photo taken with a wide-angle lens. So let us put it to the test.

The panorama setup with a telephoto lens on a nodal slide for horizontal and vertical parallax correction.
I took a photo with a 24mm wide-angle lens from a tripod. I then photographed the same angle of view with a 100mm lens. For this, I made a series of images with a panorama setup to prevent parallax.

The differences... Or the lack of them

When we look at the photos side by side, there is absolutely no difference to see. Everything is the same size, or rather the same small size in the frame. The photos do not show that they were made in different ways.

A panorama made from 44 shots at a 100mm focal length on a 45mp camera.
All the proportions of elements in your landscape are exactly the same. It does not matter whether you used a series of telephoto shots or a wide-angle lens. There is no compressing effect, or any other effect that reveals the use of a longer focal length.

There is one very big difference. The panorama made with the telephoto shots has an extremely high resolution. In other words, you can zoom in further without losing sharpness.

This panorama of 44 shots at a 100mm focal length produced a 789-megapixel photo, 38,590px x 20,457px. Who needs this resolution? Or was a single wide-angle shot with 45mp enough?
You cannot see this increase in resolution on your screen. Nor can you see it when you print the photo, unless you could print a billboard at 300dpi. And even then, only if you are standing right in front of it.

What about the compressing effect?

Do you find it strange that the 'compressing effect' of a telephoto lens is not visible? If so, I understand. Did you know that the compressing effect does not actually exist? At least, not if you do not change the distance to your foreground.

To achieve the so-called compressing effect, you have to stand further away from your foreground with a telephoto lens. The idea behind this effect is that your foreground remains the same size in your photo, regardless of your focal length.

The same tree, or what is left of it, at a 35mm focal length on a 1.3x crop camera. The horizon is shown approximately four times larger because the focal length is approximately twice as long. The tree is the same size in the frame because I stood twice as far away. This is the compressing effect.
Because you make sure that the foreground is the same size as with a wide-angle lens, it will look as if only the background has been enlarged when using a telephoto lens. This is called the compressing effect.

If you do not change the distance to your foreground, the size ratio between the foreground and background will simply remain the same.

Conclusion

Although this is a fairly extreme comparison, it clearly shows that a wide-angle shot or a panorama with a telephoto lens produces the same result. You only get a higher resolution.

There are a few things to consider when you choose a panorama instead of a single wide-angle shot. First, you need to ensure parallax correction with a multi-row panorama head for the best result. You also need quite a lot of processing power to work with the enormous resolution.

Whether all that extra effort is necessary is something you can best decide for yourself.

Something else to bear in mind

I want to emphasise that a panorama with a telephoto lens is not always possible. Landscapes with movement in particular will cause problems.

The movement between the individual images does not line up, which means that stitching them into a panorama will produce major errors that are difficult or impossible to correct.

Do you have a dynamic photo with a lot of movement? Then it is impossible to photograph it as a panorama with a telephoto lens
Do you ever use a panorama with a telephoto lens as an alternative to a wide-angle lens? Share your experiences in a comment below this article.

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