A 24-105mm f/4 zoom lens looks like the practical pick until you start worrying that it will leave you stuck with flat light and busy backgrounds. This video makes a sharper point: the zoom isn’t the limitation, the way you drive it is.
Coming to you from Mitch Lally, this grounded video reframes how you use a zoom lens when you want consistent results instead of lucky ones. The first idea is discipline, not gear: treat your zoom like a set of fixed focal lengths, not an endless range you scrub through. Lally suggests locking in familiar stops like 24, 35, 50, 85, and 135 and shooting only that view for long stretches, even if your lens can do more. Do it long enough and you start recognizing scenes as “a 50mm look” or “an 85mm look” before the camera is up. That changes your pace in the field, and it also exposes how often you stay in one spot and let the ring replace decisions.
He’s also honest about why people dismiss zooms, especially variable-aperture models: you usually give up light and blur compared to a prime lens. Instead of pretending that doesn’t matter, he leans into what you can control. If you want stronger separation, stop placing the subject right against the background, because it will read as sharp clutter at f/4. Pull the subject forward a few steps, then adjust your own distance, and the background starts to fall apart in a cleaner way. He adds a second lever that many people underuse: stepping back and zooming longer can change the depth-of-field feel even before you touch aperture, which is why he talks about working with a 24-105mm f/4 zoom lens at the long end from 10 to 15 m away. If you’ve been shooting close and wide, then wondering why everything looks stuck on the same plane, that one adjustment stings a little.
Then he pivots to the part that actually saves you when the “stand back and zoom in” move isn’t possible. Background blur is nice, but it’s unreliable in tight interiors, crowded sidewalks, and any place where you can’t move. Lally’s workaround is composition that stays readable even when the background won’t soften. He talks about arranging the background so it doesn’t fight the subject, watching for colors and patterns that clash, and using contrast on purpose rather than hoping blur will hide problems. If the subject is bright, place them against something darker. If the subject is in shadow, let the background go bright and push a silhouette, and you end up choosing the background instead of accepting it.
What’s useful here is how he connects focal length practice to those background decisions. Once you can “see” 24mm versus 50mm versus 85mm without raising the camera, you start predicting what gets pulled into the frame and what gets excluded. You also stop treating zooming as cropping, because moving your feet changes perspective while zooming changes framing, and the two together can either clean up a background or wreck it fast. There’s a subtle tension he keeps alive: you can get an image that looks polished with f/4, but only if you’re willing to work the scene, not just the settings. He also tees up a fourth tip and a bigger workflow shift that ties all of this together, including how to choose focal length with intention instead of guessing until it “sort of works." Check out the video above for the full rundown from Lally.
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