I had a portrait session a few weeks ago where everything looked technically fine but the images felt flat. The exposure was good, the light was good, my subject was relaxed. But something about the face looked compressed, a little disconnected from the background, kind of lifeless in a way I couldn’t immediately name. I went back through my shots and realized I had been shooting most of them at 70mm from maybe six feet away. Not wrong, exactly. But not right for what I was trying to do.

That’s when I came across this short tutorial from Joel Grimes, and it clicked into place.

Focal Length Changes the Shape of Your Subject’s Face

The core point Grimes makes is one that gets skipped over in a lot of beginner tutorials: focal length doesn’t just determine how much of the scene you capture. It physically changes the way your subject’s face and body appear in the image.

A wide lens (think 24mm or 35mm) gets you physically closer to your subject to fill the frame. That proximity distorts. Noses look larger, foreheads push toward the camera, and the face can take on a slightly exaggerated, almost caricature-like quality. Sometimes that’s exactly what you want for drama or personality. But for flattering portraits, it’s usually not your friend.

A longer lens (85mm, 135mm, even 200mm) lets you step back from your subject while still filling the frame with their face. That distance compresses the features. The nose sits more naturally relative to the ears. The face looks more dimensional in a way that most people recognize as “a good photo of me.”

How Distance and Focal Length Work Together

Here’s the part that surprised me when I first thought about it carefully. The distortion isn’t really caused by the lens itself. It’s caused by the distance between you and your subject. The focal length just determines how far back you have to stand to get the framing you want.

So if you shoot a face at two feet with a 24mm and then shoot that same face at two feet with an 85mm, you’d see similar distortion because your physical position hasn’t changed. The difference is that the 85mm forces you to move back to ten or twelve feet to get that same face-filling frame, and that distance is what removes the distortion.

Grimes walks through this clearly in the video, which is worth watching just to see the side-by-side comparisons on screen. But the practical takeaway is: if you’re shooting portraits and your lens of choice is a 35mm, be mindful of how close you’re standing. Even a few extra feet can make a real difference to the shape of your subject’s face.

What This Means for Environmental Portraits Specifically

This is where it gets interesting for travel and lifestyle work, which is most of what I shoot. Environmental portraits are portraits where the background matters. You want the person and the place to tell a story together.

Wide lenses naturally pull more background into the frame, which can be useful. But if you go too wide and too close, you get a warped subject against a stretched background, and neither element looks good. A longer lens compresses both the subject and the background together, which can actually make your backgrounds feel more present and intentional, not farther away.

I’ve started defaulting to 85mm for most of my environmental portrait work now, unless I’m in a tight indoor space where I physically can’t back up. At 85mm I can stand far enough back that my subject’s face looks natural, and the background still reads clearly behind them without that pulled, stretched quality you get from shooting wide and close.

Where I’d Push Back Slightly

I want to be honest about one place where this framing can oversimplify things. Grimes is talking primarily in the context of flattering portrait work, and he’s right in that context. But there are creative situations where wide-and-close distortion is the whole point.

Street photographers and documentary shooters often use 28mm or 35mm precisely because of the energy and immediacy that comes from being physically close to the subject. The slight exaggeration of features can convey urgency or presence in a way that a compressed 135mm shot never would. I’ve shot some of my favorite travel portraits at 35mm from three feet away, and the slight drama in the faces is part of the image’s character.

So the rule isn’t “wide lenses are bad for people.” The rule is: understand what your lens distance combination is doing to your subject’s face, and make that choice on purpose.

The Clearest Thing to Take Away From This

If you only internalize one thing from Joel Grimes’ breakdown, make it this: the lens you choose commits you to a distance, and that distance shapes your subject’s face. Every lens choice is also a spatial choice.

Watch the full video for the visual side-by-side comparisons that make this concept immediately obvious in a way that words alone can’t quite replicate.