THE PHOTOGRAPHIC EYE

you'll have many focal lengths to
choose from. But you will probably
have at least one less f-stop than a
plain 28mm or 80mm lens would give
you. That's not a huge sacrifice under
most conditions, but it is something
to be aware of. (This is the reason we
previously suggested that you should
have at least one fixed-focal-length
lens. You never know when you'll
need to shoot something at f/2.8.)
Every lens involves a similar tradeoff.
They are all good for some kinds
of shots and not good for others. A
wide-angle, for example, would be a
poor choice for shooting a football
game. You might get some nice images
of the stadium, but the action of
the game would be utterly lost.
DIFFERENT WAYS OF
SEEING
With a 50mm lens, as we've mentioned,
things appear much as they
do through a human eye. Receding
objects will generally appear quite
normal.
With a wide angle lens, the lines of
perspective will be exaggerated, so a
building will seem taller or longer as
it recedes from you. The lens does not
actually change those lines. It only
seems to because of the wide angle of
view.
What effect do you get if you shoot
the same building, from the same
position, with both a wide angle and
a telephoto lens? The wide angle shot
will seem to distort the image to emphasize
depth, so objects will seem
farther away. The telephoto will seem
to distort it in the other direction, so
objects seem flatter and closer than
they actually are. The important
word here is seem. If you crop out of
the wide-angle photograph the portion
of the entire scene that fit into
142 The Photographic Eye
A zoom lens not only offers the benefits of several lenses in one, it \vill
also make some interesting special effects possible. This shot was made by
zooming the lens during a long exposure. (Student photograph by Charles
Cibbs.)
the telephoto shot, you would have
two virtually identical photographs.
But what about the way a wideangle
lens bends people's faces at the
edges of the frame? This is also just
an apparent distortion. The lens is accurately
recording an image from a
certain perspective. The best way to
test this is to look at a large wide
angle print with your face as close as
possible to it. The nearer you come
to matching the original viewing position
for the scene, the more normal
the photograph will look. When you
stand back from a wide-angle print,
you are simply compressing a broad
viewing angle into a smaller space, so
things look weird.