On being close enough
The argument for the 35, and against photographing people from across a road.
A long lens is a way of not being there. That is its function in sport and wildlife and it is the reason it is the wrong tool here. Compression flattens a street into a poster. Distance removes the only thing that makes the frame worth anything, which is that someone was standing in it.
The practical case
- At 35mm you have to be near enough that the scene reacts to you. The reaction is content.
- Wide lenses need foreground. Foreground needs proximity.
- A 300mm frame of a stranger is the same photograph everywhere on earth.
The other case
Distance changes the relationship without asking. Close, people can see the camera and can tell you to stop. Far, they cannot do either. A lens that removes someone’s ability to object is not a neutral piece of glass.
Close enough to be told no is the working definition of close enough.
Where the long lens still earns its place
Compression studies. Architecture stacking, rows of signage, traffic collapsing into a wall of metal. Structures cannot object, and the 75–300 is genuinely the right tool for them.
It does not come out for people. That is not a rule I have broken and then rationalised — it is one of the few I have actually held.