By Andrew Gibson

A medium, or short telephoto lens is a lens with a focal length of around 85mm to 130mm on a full-frame camera. On an APS-C camera a 50mm lens, or the 55mm end of a kit lens, is also effectively a short telephoto lens.

You can buy a prime short telephoto lens or a zoom that includes these focal lengths. If you’re on a tight budget and have a crop-sensor camera, a 50mm prime lens is an inexpensive and useful short telephoto lens.

A bonus of short telephoto lenses is that you tend to get better image quality out of them than wide-angle lenses. They suffer less from lens aberrations such as chromatic aberrations, vignetting and poor edge sharpness.

I like short telephoto lenses for their versatility. There are two types of subject that I enjoy shooting with them:

Portraits

Focal lengths of 85mm plus on a full-frame camera (50mm plus on an APS-C camera, or 40mm plus on a Micro four-thirds camera) are idea for taking portraits. These longer focal lengths are flattering and if you have a prime lens you can play around with the narrow depth-of-field that the wide aperture settings give you.

Short telephotos are versatile lenses for photographing people – you can get up close and take a full-frame portrait or move back and include the entire figure. Both the photos above were taken with an 85mm lens.

Close-up and detail work

I like to get up close and photograph details that capture the spirit of a place. The photo above, taken in a street antiques market in Shangai, is a good example.

This type of subject can help develop your eye for composition – I try and keep the composition as simple as I can when shooting details.

If you have a prime lens, the wide maximum aperture lets you shoot this sort of subject in some amazingly low light, especially if you don’t mind using high ISOs.

Andrew Gibson

Andrew S Gibson is a freelance writer and self-publisher. As Technical Editor of EOS magazine he writes about Canon EOS cameras and also pens articles about photography for other magazines and websites. He likes black and white photography, the square format and travel. He's also been known to write an ebook or two.

WEBSITE

http://www.andrewsgibson.com/blog