Telephoto lenses help create intimate portraits and images.

While the wide-angle lens remains the most effective tool for controlling perspective in editorial photography, its counterpart, the telephoto lens, also plays a critical role.

Telephoto lenses allow us to reach out into space to bring our subjects closer to us. While wide-angle lenses can expand our frame to deepen the illusion of space, telephoto lenses can compress our subjects within the frame, creating much flatter images, and layer subject upon subject to help express our ideas.

Telephoto lenses also allow us to move closer to people to create powerful portraits. We do not invade their space, and their responses are often more relaxed as a result. Most portraits are made at short telephoto fiscal lengths, such as 85mm, 90mm, 100mm and 105mm, about 6 to 10 feet away from the subject. In my first example, however, I used a very long, 432mm fiscal length to reach across a distance to fill my frame with this intimate close-up of a young Laotian boy wearing knit hat in the tropical heat (above). He saw me, but because I was so far away from him, he ignored my presence. His expression is natural and full of thought, instead of a self-conscious smile. We don't confront him--we observe him. The telephoto lens brings us so close to him that it reinforces the sense of intimacy I am trying to achieve.

For my second example (opposite, top left), I used a telephoto zoom lens set at about 200mm to flatten perspective in this photograph of a row of tombs in a Buddhist cemetery in Pakxe, Laos. Each gravestone becomes a stripe in a rainbow that brings the colors of life to this place of death. Although the markers were spaced several feet apart, I found a vantage point that allowed me to use the lens' perspective-flattening power to compress them into a common fabric, yet to still reveal a bold pattern of vertical shadows that imply dimensionality.

In my third example (far right), I used a long telephoto lens to compress a rain-swept landscape just outside California's Sonora Pass, and thereby to change its appearance and meaning by rearranging my subjects in space. I used my telephoto zoom at its longest range, 432mm, to create one of the most unusual landscape perspectives I have ever photographed. As our eyes are drawn back into the picture, the layers of compression seem to flatten and blend, while the road itself abruptly ends. It never reappears.

Meanwhile, the background hills not only change to a lighter color, but they also are much softer in focus. A long telephoto lens usually creates a softer background than a wide-angle lens does, depending on the distance from our subject and what we choose to focus on. This telephoto image becomes a photograph and an impressionistic painting at the same time. It is real, yet unreal. It is past, present and future, a truly incongruous vision.

I shot my final telephoto example in Bagan, a city of ancient temples on the barren plains of Myanmar. Dust and light and layers of telephoto compression combine to create a mood for this farming image that evokes a field of fire.

Shooting into a brutally hot setting sun through a haze of blowing dust, with my telephoto lens at its fullest extension of 432mm, I abstract the cattle, the farmers and an ancient temple rising behind them. By using optical compression and abstract backlighting, I express how archaeology and agriculture manage to exist side by side in this ancient ruined city. It becomes an image of extremes. Yet those who have labored here over the centuries have managed to persevere.

Philip N. Douglis, ABC, directs The Douglis Visual Workshops, entering its 34th year of training communicators in visual literacy. Douglis, an IABC Fellow, is the most widely known consultant on editorial photography for organizations. He offers his comprehensive six-person "Communicating with Pictures" workshops every May and October in Oak Creek Canyon, near Sedona, Arizona. For registration information, call +1 602.493.6709 or e-mail [e-mail].

Send photos for possible use in this column to The Douglis Visual Workshops, 2505 E. Carol Ave., Phoenix, AZ 65028 USA.

You can view Douglis' multigallery cyberbook on expressive digital travel photography at www.pbase.com/pnd1.