Perspective
Oct 17th, 2007 by Larry
One of the things I like best about photography is selecting something small from a much larger environment or object. Fortunately, there are lenses for that!
When I first got my camera I had a wide angle lens and a medium zoom-telephoto lens. The wide angle is great for capturing a panoramic image of the world, but everything in such an image appears so small that it’s impossible to see all the beauty hidden in the details. Snow-capped mountain peaks reflected in clear quiet lakes are stunning. The sense of size, scale, and dimension is preserved. The three elk grazing near that stand of cedars in the verdant valley encompassing the lake get lost in the clutter, however. Sometimes you want to see the forest.
The telephoto lens can move in close and single out a particular blossom. It can select an individual from a group, or a window on a building. Longer lenses foreshorten distances. The sense of scale is distorted so that objects at various distances from the camera appear much closer to one another that they actually are. Telephotos also minimize the area that remains in focus. Where a wide-angle lens might render an entire landscape scene in focus, the telephoto will focus on a specific subject, such as the face of a child, and render the foreground and background out of focus. This has the wonderful effect of making the primary subject stand out in sharp relief against the background, which often appears as nothing more than an abstract mix of colors. Sometimes you want to see each of the trees in the forest.
After I’d had the camera for a while, my wife (she’s pretty great) bought me another lens as an anniversary gift. This lens was designed specifically for close-up, or “macro”, photography. With this lens I can get even more selective. The macro lens lets me get so close that it’s easy to capture a single bee pollinating a flower, the nectar on the stamen of a lily, dew drops on a spider web on an early Autumn morning, or the scene reflected in my own eye! Sometimes you want to see the needles on the tip of a single twig on a single branch on an individual pine tree in the forest.
Noteworthy photography is all about light and perspective. Perspective can make two well-lit images of the same scene look completely different. Sometimes we need to get really close and look at things in minute detail–sometimes not.