From: Jack Fulton (firstname.lastname@example.org)
Date: 12/18/02-10:38:19 AM Z
I've been thinking about this scale thing for a while . . actually been @
work finishing school and computer lab stuff . . and got into checking
astronomy sites. You may all know there are many double stars in the sky but
many of them are not twins but one star is waaaay behind (or further in
space) than the other.
This gives rise to the aspect of perception I alluded to in sating that
most folks don't use the tele (long) lens in landscape or other work because
the "reality" is not real enough, hence me saying it was 'anti-photographic'
thereby making it not useable, so to speak for photographers.
What happens in very long lenses (such as those on TV to make the center
fielder bigger than the pitcher) is actually distortion. It is the physical
mechanics and you might say aberration of the lens design. It seems to be
one of the limiting aspects of lens design and would ultimately require such
a humongous affair to correct the "error" it would be an unwieldy tool.
However, if a more intellectual photographer understood this 'infirmity'
and did get into Chinese (for instance) where a vertical narrative of a sort
of truncated time is what landscape is thought to be, one could create some
mighty interesting photographic images. To give you an idea, look @ Alvin
Langdon Coburn's work when he was heavily influenced by Hiroshige and
Hokusai the highly respected Japanese woodblock printers. An unusual
perspective of peering through foreground obstruction gave on a sense of
place more than a looking out.
Another person(s) influenced by a different visual perspective is/are
Lazlo Moholy-Nagy and Berenice Abbot. The skyscraper (named after the
Clipper ships that sailed from New York to San Francisco) was the first time
photographers outside of Nadar's Le Geant, his famed balloon, had achieved
such a high visual perspective. When you observe their work you'll notice
that influence in the same way such unusual perspective seeing aided Coburn.
I hope this clarifies my original meaning.
> I wrote:
>> ... But however consider that distortion around the edges
>> of the view caused by the lens (and generally more so with wider lenses)
>> may give a false impression of perspective change.
> I forgot to add that this could also be responsible for that center
> fielder looking larger than the pitcher.
> Jeffrey D. Mathias
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