Today I decided to take some closely cropped photographs of the beautiful Buddha statues in one of Bangkok’s most amazing Buddhist temples, Wat Arun.

I wanted to get some nice isolated images of just the Buddha’s face and head, together with a shallow depth of field, so I used a long range Canon 100-400mm F/4.5-5.6 L IS lens. And since I was shooting with a Sony a6300 camera, which has an APS-C cropped sensor, the focal length of the lens on this camera became a fantastic 150mm-600mm.

For those of you who are wondering, I connected the lens to the Sony a6300 with a Metabones Mark IV Canon EF to Sony E mount adapter. I also used a Sony RMT-DSLR2 Wireless Remote Commander to trigger the shutter remotely on the Sony a6300. Also, yes, the autofocus of this Canon lens works on this Sony camera with the Metabones Mark IV adapter. But since I was shooting with a tripod, I decided to manually focus all the shots and I used the camera’s focus peaking to check my focus on the LCD screen each time before triggering the shutter. Using focus peaking makes focusing very fast and easy and removes any margin of error that might occur with auto focusing.

I had originally photographed these statues about a week earlier using only a Canon 70-200mm F/4 L IS lens, but after taking the photos I felt that the lens did not change the perspective enough for what I was trying to achieve. So I went back today to reshoot everything with the 100-400mm lens instead.

I will explain. By using an even longer zoom lens this time it allowed me to stand further back from the statues than I could before. Yet, I was still able to crop in with a very tight framing in the same way as if I was standing as close to the statues as before.

The benefit of standing farther away is that it allowed me a different visual perspective. The further you get from a subject, the more the subject will appear to overlap with any other subjects that are positioned either in front or behind it.

In the case of photographing these statues, and when standing closer with a 70-200mm lens, they appeared a further distance apart in the camera than I wanted. So to reduce the gaps between the statues in my photos I needed my camera to be positioned even farther away. The 100-400mm lens allowed me to zoom in and crop equally as close to the statues as I did before with the 70-200mm lens, even though I was now positioned even further back. Yet, from being far away, I was able to compress the look of the statues as if they were really closer together than they are in real life.

In a nutshell, the optical effect of the camera being a greater distance from a subject creates a more multidimensional perspective and makes the statues optically appear closer to one another than they actually are. The other thing with really long range zoom lenses like this is that you end up with a much more shallow depth of field that makes the background look even further away than it actually is.

If you look at the photo above you might have thought that I captured the image with a very wide aperture in order to get such a heavy amount of foreground and background blurring. The truth is I shot this image at F/8 because I wanted to increase some of the sharpness and bring back some of the depth of field that is lost by such a long telephoto effect.

I then used some Color Balance, Levels, and Hue/Saturation adjustment layers in Photoshop to make the statues appear a bit darker and more orange. See below.

Here is another set of similar looking Buddha statues I also photographed today at Wat Arun:

Below is another shot I took today at another spectacular temple located in the same area called Wat Pho (The Temple Of The Reclining Buddha). These Buddha statues at Wat Pho are incredibly stunning and quite large. So I took this photo from about 20 meters away, again using the 100-400mm lens. 

Since the statues were so tall, shooting so far back from them also allowed me to make the statues appear to be at a more similar elevation to the lens. If I had been standing closer to the statues I would had to tilt the camera up more towards the statues, which would have caused barrel distortion and the perspective would have appeared as if I was standing at a much lower elevation. 

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