You can call me a geek. There are many who say that the type of brush a painter uses shapes the way a painting looks. I am going to tell you that in photography a lens sometimes is the most influential part for taking an interesting picture.
Webster says a camera is an optical device that captures images, and that photography is the art of creating images by recording light. Doesn’t that sound beautiful? And here is something amazing: light travels in a straight line, but when it moves from one medium to another—like from air into the glass of a lens—it bends. Optical engineers found that by curving the surface of glass they could make light rays bent by as much as 90 degrees. This ingenious use of the property lets gracefully redirect light coming from a vast panorama to fall onto the small surface of the sensor inside your telephone. A remarkable achievement indeed.
Wide-angle lenses see a field of view like that of our eyes – about 120 degrees. But, as with everything in life, there is a trade-off. The lenses exaggerate perspective, making things that are closer to the camera appear larger than they really are and stuff that is further away, much smaller.
As hot as cool can be.
Until the 1960’s this inherent warp was considered unappealing and wide-angle lenses were not ever used in the making of marketing images. Suddenly one day during the counterculture decade of the Sixties, photographers wanting to match the psychedelia inspired aesthetics of the time passionately embraced the distortion. Wide-angle were the lenses used to create the famous pictures of long-legged models sporting Mary Quant’s miniskirts and the eye-catching album covers of the Jimi Hendrix Experience. Wide-angle lenses became as hot as cool can be.
The distortion is now part of the culturally accepted marketing iconography and considered an artistic license. Nevertheless, wide angle-lenses still manage to get oohh’s and aahh’s. Real estate photographers use it to make rooms feel more spacious, landscape photographers to create magnificent views of sparkling night skies and beauty product photographers to make lipsticks seem larger than life.
Wide-angle lenses can also overpower the substance of a picture and become a gimmick when their perspective distortion is overused. The way these lenses create such distinct pictures makes marketing images look similar. As beauty brands prioritize originality their use in marketing images comes and go in brief cycles. A double-edge sword that fashion and beauty brands tend to handle with care.
mariano p
https://viauphotography.com/
