Telephoto

There are two measures for the "zoom" of a lens -- focal length actual distance from the lens to the focal plane -- which for the image below is 800MM -- and then the degrees, or field of view. Field of view is a bit easier to understand, I think. If you could see in every direction at once you'd see, of course, 360 degrees. You and I see roughly 45 degrees. The lens I used for the image below sees 3 degrees.

What is cool is that when you crop in on only 6% of what you normally see things get very, very dramatically compressed. We judge distance not only by our stereo vision but by relative size -- if I see two shopping carts and one is bigger than the other I will assume one is closer, not that there exists a shopping cart XL for heavy shoppers (Sam's Club shopping carts aside).

So what we have here is visual compression: a lot of objects, all looking roughly the same size, and thus right on top of each other:

Broadway from Catalpa, 2010

That building in the distance? 1.2 miles away from where I took that picture. Really, the stop light you barely see in the top right is already a block away (at Bryn Mawr).

Anyway, this is just a long way of saying that I love this image because the street lights look like they are practically leaning on each other, instead of the 80' that actually separates each one.