I’ve been a photographer since the late 1970s, and for some reason, I’ve always been oriented toward telephoto lenses. 35mm is the widest I’d ever gone, and that was only recently. It was always 50mm, 70mm, 105mm, or longer. I took lots of pictures of birds and squirrels, used macro zoom to capture objects for work, or portraits with zoom for maximum bokeh.
But then I upgraded my phone to an iPhone 15 Pro Max with that super wide-angle lens and started playing around with that. Then I bought one of those higher-end Insta360 cameras (for work, to get pictures of interiors of structures), and in using these, I realized something:
I have been seriously limiting myself.
I have no idea why I’d never been interested in wide-angle lenses, but I’m glad, really, that I’d avoided them. Why? Because now, after all these years, I have something new to explore: reality.
Our eyes are wide-angle lenses. The world is a wide-angle experience. Telephoto lenses, in a way, are a filter that allows you to focus on a detail — which is fine — but a wide-angle image gives the whole picture. It captures the whole slice of time.
I know, I know. It’s obvious. Duh, Jerry. But my point is, here I am at 63 years old, and now I get to do something new. That is a gift from my earlier self. It saved something new for me to learn and grow.
I’ve started simple, with a 10–20mm Sigma zoom lens for my Nikon that I bought used for (comparatively) next to nothing. This is in contrast to my bazooka-sized 600mm Sigma zoom. My original impetus was that I needed a lens for the Nikon to capture something large in a small space for work. But after work, I took it out and started exploring the rest of reality with it.
I love it. It’s made me an instant wide-angle-phile.
