Digicams -- going with the telephoto

One of the things I've been mulling over lately is what digital camera I am going to get next. I had been looking at the next generation of 12X optical zoom prosumer cameras and debating whether to go for the more powerful macro or more telephoto. My current camera is a 10X Fuji s5000, now three years old, but still taking great pictures. More telephoto has won, hands down.

Basically, it is because I like shots like this:



One of the cameras I was looking at gave me even more macro, but with less telephoto. The energy of the foreshortening effect is fantastic, and I don't want to give any of it up. I especially like that shot above because of the mountains hanging ghostly in the background. The way the telephoto can be used to push everything in the shot together yields some wonderful picture effects -- these betel nut girls below are actually about 30-40 meters apart...




...I love the shots where the streets are empty, and the buildings loom large, and crowd against each other....



And this one, where the northbound lane of the freeway appears even more intensely crowded with cars returning home for Chinese New Year with the added power of the telephoto



and this, the mountains near Taliao on a clear day right after a typhoon.



and especially this one......



When I was growing up and looking at Asia, the stereotyped shot was like that one above, or this one below:



...the streets crowded with signs, though usually there were more people....like this one:



.....or this....



...or telephoto shots over cities like this one over Keelung.



Probably somewhere a cultural critic has written a learned tome about how the telephoto lens overdramatizes the effect of crowding in Asia, orientalizing it visually for westerners (where the telephoto is used to emphasize space, as in the stereotyped shots of endless lines of telephone wires lining empty western highways). But for me, even after all these years, a telephoto lens and a crowded city still says Asia......

[Taiwan] [Asia] [photography]