Photo technical note
Nov. 29th, 2011 09:08 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
guppiecatI don't generally post technical stuff about photography (but that may be changing... we'll see). However, I wanted to point out this post from Emily Knudsen. I love her food photography, so I've started following her blog. This point, though, is about a particular flower photo.
A lot of photo books talk about using a long lens to "narrow the angle of view" and "to foreshorten the image", but this is the best illustration I've seen of what that means.
Look at the first photo in the montage (top left). Now look at the setup shot (bottom right, one up from the bottom). See how far away she is to get that photo? See how she's using a long lens?
Now look at the first photo again. See how there's just enough background to provide context and not look boringly white or overly busy? That's because the angle of view was narrowed by distance and the long lens, so there's less stuff behind the flowers. It also means that it's easier to pick an appropriate background. (This bit is tricky in zoo photography, by the way.) Also, see how the image seems to form itself into planes? You have the flowers in the foreground, the chairback in the mid-ground (sorta, it's angled) and the out of focus background. The fact that the flowers don't look very three dimensional is the foreshortening effect. If a longer lens had been used, it would look even flatter. If a shorter lens had been used, they'd look deeper, bushier and more out-of-control.
I just thought this was a really good illustration of a concept I had trouble with when I was just getting started in this hobby.
A lot of photo books talk about using a long lens to "narrow the angle of view" and "to foreshorten the image", but this is the best illustration I've seen of what that means.
Look at the first photo in the montage (top left). Now look at the setup shot (bottom right, one up from the bottom). See how far away she is to get that photo? See how she's using a long lens?
Now look at the first photo again. See how there's just enough background to provide context and not look boringly white or overly busy? That's because the angle of view was narrowed by distance and the long lens, so there's less stuff behind the flowers. It also means that it's easier to pick an appropriate background. (This bit is tricky in zoo photography, by the way.) Also, see how the image seems to form itself into planes? You have the flowers in the foreground, the chairback in the mid-ground (sorta, it's angled) and the out of focus background. The fact that the flowers don't look very three dimensional is the foreshortening effect. If a longer lens had been used, it would look even flatter. If a shorter lens had been used, they'd look deeper, bushier and more out-of-control.
I just thought this was a really good illustration of a concept I had trouble with when I was just getting started in this hobby.
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Date: 2011-11-29 06:55 pm (UTC)Especially since lots of books (and people) get it wrong. The longer lens doesn't directly cause foreshortening or in any other way change the perspective ("perspective" is the size and position relationships among the objects in the image); being farther off does that. But of course the narrower field of view is key to being able to shoot from farther off and still get the photo you want. However, if you shoot from a fixed position with two lenses of different focal lengths, and crop the image from the wider one to match the field of view of the longer one, the perspectives will be identical (there will be grain/noise/resolution differences due to the different degrees of enlargement).
This is one reason "zooming with your feet" is so important.