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Actually its the other way around. You wont get the same perspective being lazy using a zoom at its 105 mm setting as walking up to your subject with a 35mm as there is a reason the smaller focallenghts, 28-50mm was/is the choice of most succesfull street photographing. The relationship between field of view and perspective of wider focallenghts at their "sweetspot" for people photographing is what draws the viewer into the pic and the story rather than seeing it from a distance so you cant just stay put zoom your lens and get thats pic.
I dont remember who said "No great photo was ever taken with a tele lens"
You're barking mad aren't you?
It's not about being lazy or not. It's about the picture you want, if that draws people in or not or what focal length you like or don't is subjective and I'm not getting into that here as you're changing the goal posts and introducing arguments to justify a misguided statement.
All I'm doing here is correcting the notion that you can zoom with your feet which is clearly misguided.
The simple fact is that if you look at a scene and are happy with it that includes the camera to subject distance which decides the perspective. Fill the frame with your subject with a 200mm lens and then walk up to your subject and fill the frame with a 20mm lens to get the same framing and that'll give you a rather extreme example of why the statement "zoom with your feet" is misguided.
As a little experiment to show that it's camera to subject distance that decides the perspective not focal length try this...
Stand still... take a shot of something with a long lens and without moving point your camera in the same direction again and take the shot with a shorter focal length. Now walk closer with the shorter focal length until you match the framing of the longer lens and take the shot yet again.
What you'll have now is three pictures.
1 Long length shot.
2 Short focal length shot.
3 Short length shot but matching the framing of the long lens.
You will now find that you can crop shot 2 to make it look like shot 1, other than the resolution you've lost in cropping, but you'll still be able to see that the perspective is exactly the same You will also see that the perspective of shot 3 is completely different to the other two shots.
If anyone thinks that zooming with your feet is the same as changing focal length please try that little experiment and see if it changes your mind
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