@mattblaze I guess it's still incorrect re: telephoto, but I ain't gonna redo the meme third time

![The "Don't make me tap the sign" meme template. The sign being tapped says '"oom"doesn't mean long reach or high magnification. That's called "telephoto". "Zoom" means variable focal length.

Your phone doesn't have "optical zoom", it just has multiple lenses with different fixed focal lengths that it can switch between.'](https://static.glitch.social/media_attachments/files/115/332/746/363/143/758/original/c3c5893cd7e325d1.png)

@mattblaze Interesting. I've never heard of this differentiation. I always thought tele(photo) meant the same as long. Most interesting to me about this is that I at the same time can't understand why somebody would call long lenses zoom when they aren't zoom lenses as you suggest some people do sometimes.

@mattblaze what do you mean by “their physical length is shorter than their optical focal length”?

@mattblaze I’ve been doing photography for 30 years (5 years professionally) and I learned this today from you.

@mattblaze I've been shooting for many years including on a semi-professional level for the past decade and I never knew that's what telephoto meant!I learned the hard way that even moderately long focal lengths are enough to produce very significant atmospheric distortion. I've shot parades regularly. Crowds are a constant problem for parade photographers so I learned to bring a step ladder and a long lens to get around the people.This worked great until I had to shoot a parade someplace with humidity. All of my distance shots lacked sharpness. I thought I had a camera problem. It wasn't until I had to do the same shoot the following year that I realized the air was imperceptibly hazy to the naked eye.

@mattblaze Heck, a 40mm pancake (mine is ~30mm long) could be considered a "telephoto".

@mattblaze pedantic but interesting. The Venn diagram lunes of the exceptions must be interesting.

And none of this has anything to do with whether a lens is a "zoom", which refers to lenses with a focal length that can be varied across a range to achieve different angles of view without changing lenses. Many people casually use "zoom", "telephoto", and "long" interchangeably (usually when they just mean "long"), but that just confuses people who understand the technical meaning of those terms.