The Case for Shooting Cities With a Telephoto Lens

Most people reach for a wide angle the moment they step into a city center, cramming as much of the skyline into the frame as they can. A long telephoto flips that instinct, letting you pull out single details and stack layers of a city in ways a 24mm never could.

Walking through Gateshead and across the High Level Bridge into Newcastle, Jason Row puts a Sigma 100-400mm Contemporary to work on a subject it's rarely associated with. Row pairs it with a Sony body, and he's upfront about the physical cost. This is not a discreet lens, and a hot day with a loaded backpack turns it into hard work. The payoff is the reach and the compression, which let him isolate architectural details, juxtapose old buildings against new, and grab reflections and geometry that a wider lens would swallow up in clutter.

His camera settings are worth copying if you try this yourself. Row shoots in shutter priority at 1/250 second, with lens image stabilization set to mode one, in-body stabilization on, and auto ISO ranging from 100 to 12,800. A long lens punishes slow shutter speeds with camera shake, so keeping the shutter fixed and letting ISO float covers the dark corners of a city without a second thought. He also uses that shutter control creatively, ramping the speed up to freeze a train crossing the bridge or dragging it down to smear motion into the same scene.

Lens compression is the principle doing the heavy lifting here, and it's worth understanding beyond this one walk. Compression is a byproduct of distance, not the focal length itself. When you stand far back and zoom to 400mm, the background appears to crush toward your subject, which is why a bus or tram fills the frame while the buildings behind it press in close. This is the same effect film directors use to make crowds feel packed or a runner seem to sprint in place. In a dense city, it means you can build clean, graphic images out of chaos, stacking a modern facade against a centuries-old one so they read as a single flat plane. Once you start seeing your surroundings as layers rather than scenes, the whole city becomes raw material.

Row also makes a quieter argument for the telephoto as a tool for people. He's candid that he struggles with street photography and dislikes getting close to strangers, and a long lens solves that by letting him isolate someone from a distance without stepping into their space. The same reach that flatters a passing train works on a lone figure against an interesting backdrop. He notes the transport shots have been some of his best sellers, and he points to the value of a locked-off tripod for both stills and video, a look most online video misses because so much of it is shot handheld or on a gimbal at wider focal lengths.

Watch the video above to see the shots Row pulls off across Newcastle and Gateshead and how he plans to use the lens at the Millennium Bridge.