Two figures share a photograph and refuse to share anything else. He stands on the left in a black suit, glasses, mid-sentence, addressing someone outside the frame. She stands on the right in a black slip dress, eating from a paper wrapper, eyes down. Running between them is the white vertical edge of a display panel, and that edge does more work than either sitter. The object The panel edge falls near the golden section rather than the middle, which is why the split reads as deliberate instead of careless.

This beach frame is a good argument for the 135mm focal length. The woman sitting on the sand holds the eye because she’s the only thing rendered with any real detail. Everything behind her turns into a wash of turquoise and green: umbrellas, chairs, sunbathers, a whole crowded stretch of coastline reduced to shapes and patches of colour. Nothing back there competes with her, and nothing back there had to be moved, cropped out or waited for.

Stand behind a line of photographers pointed at something offshore and you can price the whole row without asking a single question. Two or three big white primes, a handful of black consumer superzooms, at least one lens discontinued before mirrorless existed. One person has a monopod planted in the sand and the rest are holding everything up with their arms. They are all framing the same subject at roughly the same size.

A ring light is the only modifier that puts the light source exactly where your lens is. Everything else about it follows from that one fact, including the things people find surprising about it later. It isn’t a soft box with a hole in it and it isn’t a beauty dish. It’s a light that sits on the optical axis, and on-axis light behaves in a way nothing else does.

Every high viewpoint makes the same promise and breaks it the same way. You climb, you turn around, and there it is: the whole city, the port, the coastline, everything at once. Then you look at the back of the camera and you’ve got a grey smear with a horizon somewhere inside it. The height was never the difficult part. Getting up there is a lift ticket or a set of stairs.

Three people leaning on a railing, all of them facing away, and behind them a wall of orange that used to be flowering shrubs. Nothing back there survives as an object. It survives as colour. Most people who want this look go shopping for a faster lens first. That is usually the wrong move. Aperture is involved, but it is the third thing that matters, and buying your way to f/1.

The instinct with any big raptor is to get the face. Wait for the head-on stare, fill the frame with the beak, go home. That instinct throws away the best part of a griffon vulture, which is the back. Scapulars and wing coverts laid over each other like roof tiles, every feather a slightly different shade of sand and buff, the whole thing narrowing into near-black flight feathers at the bottom.

A frame like this one looks like a still from a film, and people usually credit the grade for that. The grade is the last five percent. Everything that makes it read as cinema was decided at the moment of shooting: how far back I stood, what focal length I put between me and the subject, how much of the background I let dissolve, and which of the four or five competing light sources I let win.

Three brands sit in this frame and none of them paid to be there. A Zara carrier bag swinging at the subject’s hip, a Holland & Barrett hanging sign in the upper left, an iPhone held flat in her right hand. Nobody art-directed any of it. This is what brand photography looks like when the brands turn up on their own. The bag does structural work Look at where the eye goes.

Two photographers, two cameras, one accidental argument. The Canon is wearing a first-party red-ring zoom. The Sony is wearing a prime that Sony didn’t make. Nobody staged that as a comparison, but it explains the two systems better than any spec sheet does. Sensor comparisons are a waste of your afternoon. Both systems produce files that will outrun your printing habits. Autofocus is excellent on both and has been for years.