[snip] ...But if you have a fixed lens, you may have to be a bit more creative in selecting your vantage point.
I hear a lot of this talk about fixed lenses ~forcing~ one to seek out creative vantage points. The operative phrase here is "seek out creative vantage points". This can (and should) be done regardless of whether you use a zoom or a prime lens. One has to train his/her eye to recognize a good composition from a bad one, and to learn the see-saw relationship between vantage point and field of view. The zoom lens is a more flexible tool offering far more aesthetic choices and useful vantage points than any set of primes. If anything, primes should be aknowledged for their simplicity. Too many choices may overwhelm a beginner. This is my analysis as to why a novice photographer may make "blah" photographs with a zoom, not because it was a quick and dirty way out of spending time on the composition. With so many choices to make with the zoom, the novice simply makes a few more "wrong" choices (i.e. zooms instead of changing camera position). It is debatable whether ~forcing~ a photographer to ONLY change position is of value. It does teach a lesson I suppose, but places all the emphasis on perspective and virtually none on the effect of focal length. If a photographer is always lazy by zooming, he/she may just as likely be lazy by using only one focal length all of the time. A balance of the right perspective and the right focal length is required to obtain the best shot. Whether this is done with zooms or primes is irrelevant, and a matter of taste. Just my .02 LAUNCH - Your Yahoo! Music Experience http://launch.yahoo.com - This message is from the Pentax-Discuss Mail List. To unsubscribe, go to http://www.pdml.net and follow the directions. Don't forget to visit the Pentax Users' Gallery at http://pug.komkon.org .
