Pretty sure the lens flare was just added in photoshop. As far as the “tele lens” goes, I think that’s just a semantics thing. I agree that shooting straight into the sun like that would make it impossible to get that exposure.

You’ll learn pretty quickly how just aperture affects a photo, in how much depth of field you have. The part that’s more nuanced is figuring how zoom plays into that as well. Zoom also compresses the depth in a shot, so to speak. The most extreme version you’ll see is towns with mountains towering above them that seem like they’re in the back yard, but there’s really a ton of distance. It just looks almost flat because the photographer is using a really long lens.

There are apps/calculators that will give you the depth of field for any given focal length and aperture, but I found it to be a lot of trial and error when learning how the various settings work together.

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You can, and I’m doing that right now. Logged into lemmy.ml through their site. However, I can see how one might be hesitant to log in through a 3rd party like this. It does look really nice, but I do wish it had a light mode as well.