Had you met me when I was younger, between 1984 and 2005, and told me that most of my lenses would be wide angle, and my photographic style would be defined by wide compositions, I wouldn’t have believed you; in fact, I’d say there’s no way. In my early photography, I defined good photography as successful presentation of a beautiful detail through isolation, using depth of field.

Here are some of my earliest preserved works:

Those are all colour negative prints, 35mm film, year 2000 or earlier, but nothing earlier than than 1998, I think. Everything earlier than that was left at my parents’ place when I moved out. You can see the pattern in all of them – basically, get close, get the detail, isolate it from the rest of the world, and capture that feeling. I’s not a matter of equipment; I used a 35-70mm zoom lens, so I could have gone wide enough, but I didn’t; even when I did, I sucked at it because I didn’t know how to compose wide.

This is my first successful wide-angle shot:

Probably because I used Romana’s film point and shoot camera which didn’t have the closeup functionality I instinctively relied on, I composed the picture differently, but that did not result in a change of style. In fact, my pictures in the following years were more in the line of this:

You get the picture; again, remove the detail from the world, find the beauty as separate, isolated, in a photographic equivalent of meditation.

It’s not that I stopped taking such pictures completely; they still make up a significant portion of my work. However, a typical shot I am aiming for these days is something like this:

I’m trying to figure out the differences and similarities myself, because it’s not that the wide-angle compositions lack that meditative feeling of the closeup shots. It would be too easy to say that I just learned to evoke a similar feeling with a different technique, but I don’t feel that it tells the whole story. You see, in order to do a closeup shot, you need to remove almost everything from the composition. With an ultrawide lens, everything that is in front of you will be in the frame, even your shoes or tripod legs if you’re not careful. With it, you can no longer abstract ugly and the mundane from your composition and create beauty by omission. You need to compose the entire world in front of you into an artefact of beauty. It’s not just a matter of photographic technique; it’s something about the worldview, about not fearing chaos and ugliness and escaping into reduction.

It’s not just a matter of using an ultrawide lens. The picture above is made with an 85mm portrait lens, at f/1.8, but I would never have used such a wide composition in my early years. Even when using a long-ish lens and shallow depth of field, I’m leaving more of the environment in the composition.

I mean, this is taken with a 400mm telephoto wide open, for fuck’s sake. If you gave this lens to my 2000 self, I’d have composed it so tight you’d see nothing but the cyclist’s head and shoulders, most likely. This is a normal, slightly wide composition, just with telephoto spatial compression. I remember a conversation I had with two people, somewhere around 1999-2000, about what equipment I’d like to have. The first thing would be a digital camera that has a 35mm sensor capable of full film quality, not the stupid toys that existed those days, but real replacement of film with digital technology with preservation of everything that’s good about film. The second thing I wanted was a big zoom lens, essentially this 100-400mm telephoto that I have now. What I couldn’t imagine then was the way I would use that big zoom lens. I would expect portraits of birds in their environment. I wouldn’t expect, essentially, normal to wide compositions with spatial compression:

I think I’m starting to understand what I’m doing there. It resembles the difference between meditating in a quiet, isolated room with your eyes closed, and learning to meditate with your eyes open while walking or interacting with people. It’s a difference between having to hide from disturbances, learning to ignore them, and finally learning to make them part of the experience. It’s a transition between waiting for your wife to stop taking pictures and remove herself from the composition, then composing her into the shot as a joke, and then intentionally composing her into the environment as a stylistic choice that makes the compositions what they are.