Telephoto Is For Cowards

If your photographs aren't good enough, you aren't close enough.
-- Robert Capa

I have a few pet peeves on DPReview and other on-line camera fora. One of them is the question "Which is the best telephoto lens for candids?" It gets asked a lot, and answered a lot. Usually the answers are something like "The 135/2L" or "The 70-200/2.8 IS L" or even (God forbid) "The 100-400 IS L." To make it worse, lenses on all-in-one cameras are getting longer and longer, not even to mention the 33x zooms on camcorders. Now, I'm generally of the opinion that in photography anything goes -- do whatever rocks your boat. However, there are limits, and this is one of them. The fact is, real photographers don't shoot candids with telephoto lenses.    

Farmhand in Camargue. He took us to watch the steers being fed. I'd been taking pictures of everything that moved. He wasn't paying attention to me when I took this one.  (EOS-10D  with Tokina 17/3.5.)

Photographers are going through all kinds of harassment nowadays. Taking a photo of a bridge is considered tantamount to planning to blow it up. One major reason for this is image. One pervasive image of the photographer is the celebrity-stalking paparazzi, the sleazy PI on Cheaters, and the creepy old guy in the trenchoat in the woods by the playground, all of whom wield big black cameras and three-foot-long lenses. This is the image of the photographer as stalker: someone who sees us from a long way off without us seeing him; who steals our picture without our knowledge, for some sinister purpose or other. This image is only reinforced by incompetent "professionals" shooting "candids" at weddings with similar gear, and making it a point of pride to get people on film or on chip when they didn't realize that they were being photographed.