There’s a specific kind of frustration I know well: standing in a beautiful location, cards full of technically correct photos, and still feeling like none of them quite worked. It happened to me last fall shooting along the Washington coast. I had my usual kit, I hit my exposures, and I came home with images that felt flat. Not broken. Just… flat.

That trip sent me back to basics, and eventually back to this short but dense tutorial from Joel Grimes on how lens selection shapes not just what you capture, but how a viewer feels inside the frame.

Lens Choice Is a Creative Statement, Not a Technical Default

Most beginners (and honestly, a lot of intermediates) pick a lens based on what fits in the frame. Subject too far away? Zoom in. Too close? Step back. Joel Grimes pushes against that instinct directly. His argument is that the focal length you choose changes the relationship between your subject and the world around them. That’s not a subtle distinction. It reshapes the entire emotional tone of the image.

A wide lens pulls the environment into the story. A longer lens compresses space and isolates. Neither is right or wrong, but choosing without intention is a missed creative decision. And most of us are making it on autopilot.

What Compression Actually Does to a Portrait

Here’s the practical breakdown from the tutorial. When you shoot a portrait with a wide focal length and get close to your subject, you introduce distortion. The nose pushes forward, the ears recede, the face reads as slightly alien. That distortion can be an artistic choice, but used accidentally it just looks unflattering.

Grimes walks through the alternative: back up, use a longer focal length (he’s working in portrait-friendly ranges here, think 85mm and beyond), and let the compression work for you. The background stacks up behind the subject. The face reads with natural proportions. The subject feels anchored in the frame rather than floating in front of it.

The physical move is: increase your distance from the subject, increase your focal length to compensate and maintain framing. The math keeps your subject roughly the same size in frame. But the perspective shift changes everything around them.

How This Plays Differently in Environmental Portraits

This is where it gets interesting for the kind of shooting I do. Travel and lifestyle work often means I want the place to matter. I want the narrow alley in Porto or the foggy Pike Place morning to be as much a character as the person in front of my camera.

In those situations, Grimes’ compression principle flips into something you have to weigh carefully. Back up and use a longer lens, and you lose the sense of depth in the scene. The environment compresses too, which can make a layered, textured location feel like a painted backdrop. Sometimes that’s gorgeous. Sometimes it strips exactly the thing that made the location worth shooting in the first place.

My personal workaround: I’ll use a wider focal length for environmental portraits, but I get very deliberate about where I’m placing the subject within the space. I use leading lines and foreground elements to manufacture the depth that compression would otherwise provide. It’s more work to compose, but the location earns its place in the image.

That’s not a contradiction of what Grimes teaches. It’s the other side of the same coin. Understanding compression is what lets you decide when to use it and when to fight it.

The Part Beginners Skip: Zooming With Your Feet

One thing Grimes emphasizes that I think gets glossed over: don’t reach for the zoom ring first. Move. Changing your physical position changes your perspective in ways a zoom ring simply cannot replicate. The zoom ring changes magnification. Your feet change your relationship to the subject and everything around it.

This is a habit I drill in my Sunday morning photo walks. I’ll pick a single prime lens and commit to it for the whole walk. No zooming out of trouble. If something isn’t working, I move. It forces creative problem-solving in real time, and after a few months of that practice, I started seeing locations in terms of the perspective I wanted before I even raised the camera.

If you want a starting exercise: take one lens, one subject, and make ten different photos without changing any settings except your feet. You’ll start to understand what focal length is actually doing by watching the background shift as you move.

The One Idea Worth Keeping

Focal length is not a framing tool. It is a storytelling tool. Once that clicks, you stop asking “does this fit in frame?” and start asking “what does this focal length say about the relationship between my subject and the world they’re standing in?”

Grimes covers the visual side of this in a way that’s genuinely hard to explain in text alone, so do yourself a favor and watch the full video to see the before-and-after comparisons in action.