What is a Telephoto Lens?

If you’re indulging in photography, you would like to learn some photography tips and related kits. And telephoto lens is one of the most significant and indispensable kits that help you take your photography to the next level. Usually, telephoto lenses could also be one of the most popular lenses for photography, tending to be the staple in taking most wide-angle landscape pictures and pet photos, etc. If you are willing to be a skillful photographer, you are likely to learn more about what a telephoto lens is and how to use it.

Part 1: What is a Telephoto Lens?

Generally, a telephoto lens is a type of long-focus lens that offers a long reach and can easily display objects at a far distance with greater accuracy and advanced precision. Besides, a telephoto lens allows you to magnify and photograph distant subjects according to how long the focal length is. A telephoto lens usually has a focal length of 60mm or longer, and the longer the focal length, the more magnification there is. There is common medium telephoto lens with a focal range of 70mm to 200mm, and a super telephoto lens that has a focal length longer than about 300mm. A telephoto lens has gained massive popularity over the years and has been commonly used by both amateur and professional photographers in a number of situations.

Part 2: What is a Telephoto Lens Used for?

It is obvious that a telephoto lens makes great improvement in photography. Some may be still in confusion on what is a telephoto lens used for. Here come some instructions.

△ Use a Telephoto Lens for Getting Close to the Distant Subject

A telephoto lens makes subjects appear closer to the camera so that you can take photos of subjects that are farther away. It also helps improve the visual relationship between a subject and its environment by creating the appearance of a kind of compression effect. When you are taking a picture of a subject that is far away from you, you can use a telephoto lens to highlight the subject and get a compressed perspective.

△ Use a Telephoto Lens for Getting Stunning Detail Photos

A telephoto lens allows you to magnify details, so you can capture a beautiful, subtle photo of the subject. For instance, when you are intended to capture close-up images of wildlife animals or other subjects, a telephoto lens can magnify a bird’s eyes or a tree’s leaves or even an eagle’s feathers or even part of an urban landscape. In this way, you are going to get stunning photos with attracting or unique details.

△ Use a Telephoto Lens for Emphasizing Blurred Backgrounds

A telephoto lens allows you to take a photo where the subject is in focus but the background is blurred. In this case, it can also be used in portrait and wildlife photography, especially when you shoot it with a long lens and the widest aperture available. For example, a 70-200mm telephoto lens shot at 200m with an aperture of f/2.8 will isolate your subject against a blurred background. Surely, this actually has everything to do with the distance from which you shoot your subject rather than with the lens itself. Anyway, longer lenses allow you to shoot your subjects from farther away and focus on the subjects instead of the background.

△ Use a Telephoto Lens for Creating Abstract Photos

One of the benefits of using a telephoto lens is to create abstract or semi-abstract photos. Abstract photography is to capture a small sliver of the scene that completely removes context, which is likely all about the basics: lines, shapes, colors, textures, shadows and highlights, rather than a landscape or a single subject. It’s one of the best ways to isolate the shapes and forms of a scene. To capture abstracts, a telephoto lens at hand would be advantageous.

Part 3: 3 Tips on How to Take Photos with Telephoto Lens

As a matter of fact, a telephoto lens is a wonderful tool for almost any genre of photography, but they aren’t necessarily easy to use since telephoto lenses will magnify camera shake and provide a much thinner depth of field than wide angles. When you want to take great photos with a telephoto lens, you should pay attention to the stabilization, Aperture and shallow depth of field. The longer your lens and wider your aperture, the more blur you will get. And you can also get different effects with different focal lengths. Anyway, there are so many details that you need to focus on if you are interested in telephoto photography. There is no doubt that it is a breakthrough kit helps you get unique and excellent photos. Three tips on how to take photos with a telephoto lens are available here.

Tip 1. Shoot Photos in Ideal Light Conditions

A telephoto lens is a tool that is every bit as useful as a wide-angle lens, best put to use in ideal lighting conditions. Since telephoto lenses regulate the apparent size of near and far objects, telephoto images taken in flat light conditions, or without any direct light on the scene may be a little bit dull. To avoid this, you’d better take photos in actual light on the landscape.

Tip 2. Choose Different Focal Length

When you are using a telephoto lens to take a photo, you’d better know that your choice of focal length will affect what you see. 70-200mm lenses are very popular due to their versatility and the stunning images they produce, commonly used for portraits, weddings, sports and wildlife photography. In detail, the 85mm focal length is excellent for taking portrait photos and weddings photos, 100-400mm for sports and wildlife, 135mm for portraits, sports, weddings and wildlife. Besides, using a wide aperture in this focal range, such as f/2.8, will give you a beautifully blurred background and nicely isolate your subjects.

Tip 3. Show a Sense of Scale

To show a sense of scale can be valuable in a number of different situations, from landscapes to sports, and everything in between. For example, when you show the extreme scale of the mountains in the distance, you can use 70-200mm focal length and walk farther back to capture the photo with an amazing sense of scale.

Part 4: How to Enhance Photos Shot by Telephoto Lens with Leawo PhotoIns?

Undoubtedly, it is still not easy to use a telephoto lens to take photos for professional photographers and even harder for beginners. You should also grasp the way to enhance photo shot, though some useful tips are offered above to help you take good photos with a telephoto lens. Leawo PhotoIns is a powerful AI photo enhancer that improves photos automatically and instantly. It helps you do portrait photo enhancement like retouching skin, removing freckles, enhancing eyes, adjusting lighting and more, with only a few clicks. Besides, you can also use it to automatically fix photo exposure issues, optimize photo colors and perfect photo tints, remove the haziness and so on. To enhance photos shot by telephoto lens, you can follow the steps below.

Step 1. Download and Install Leawo PhotoIns

Download Leawo PhotoIns for free and then install it on your computer in seconds.

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  - Process RAW and JPG files

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Step 2. Add Photos Shot by Telephoto Lens

Run Leawo PhotoIns and then click the “Add Photo” button to load photos shot by telephoto lens into the software. Or you can drag and drop the photos to the software for importing.

Step 3. Enhance Photos

To enhance the loaded photos shot by telephoto lens one by one, you can double click a photo to call out the preview interface. The software will automatically detect and enhance the photo. You can drag the effect adjuster bar right below the previewer to the left or to the right to get the proper effect you would like to apply. An instant previewer allows you to view the photo effects contrast of “Before” and “After”.

Step 4. Output the Enhanced Photos

Once the photo AI enhancing is completed, click the blue “Output” button at the bottom right to pop up an “Output settings” window, where you can set output position, output format, quality and other settings. And then click the blue “Output (1) photo” button to output the enhanced photo.

To sum up, a telephoto lens has a lot of benefits for all types of photography. No matter for beginners or professionals, a telephoto lens can be used to capture wonderful and unique photos. To be good at photography, you’d better learn more tips on how to use a telephoto lens and get more information on what a telephoto lens can be used for. Eventually, remember that practice makes perfect.