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Home >> Photography Magnification
and Perspective Although I wrote about perspective briefly in my e-Book on Photography, I thought an updated sequence of shots would be useful. Magnification and perspective are related, but obviously not the same. Magnification is simple enough to understand since it is magnifying a subject using more powerful lenses. Macro photography is also about magnification, but for this article, we will only look at magnification in general using regular lenses outside of the macro range. Let’s use the example of a photographer standing in one location that wants to make his subject very large. He could move up close to the subject to magnify it, but if this is not possible, then the alternative is to use a telephoto lens. Below are samples of that situation and showing the relative difference from a 16mm fisheye to a 400mm telephoto lens in terms of how wide to how narrow each lens sees. The left side shows results from film with my Nikon F100 and the right column are digital shots taken with my Nikon D100 with its 1.5x magnification factor. Foolishly, I had altered the tripod location slightly from the film shots to the digital shots, so that by the time you get to the 400mm shots, there is a discrepancy in view; however, there is still enough similarity to provide for some usefulness. One of the characteristics of a telephoto lens is the compression factor of “pushing” two objects closer together than they would appear in wide or normal focal length lenses. You can see this start happening in the film samples with the foreground boat becoming more compressed in relation to the background dock and city buildings.
Perspective is about how you wish to convey the subject in relation to its surroundings. If you wish to show your subject in its natural surroundings and provide the subject with a sense of its context within that world, you would use a wide-angle lens. How wide depends on how much of the world you wish to show with the primary subject. If you wish to isolate the subject and key in on it alone, you would use a longer lens. How long obviously depends on how much you wish the subject to be isolated. Using different lenses obviously means different views of the world, but if we just take shots from one location, as was the case in the magnification sequence above, then we do not alter perspective despite the use of ultra-wide to super long lenses. A 20mm view cropped in will result in the same perspective as one taken with a 200mm lens, provided that the shooting location did not change. However, if we use the same 20mm lens and then move right up close to the subject so that the magnification is the same (or similar), then the view is completely different than one taken with the 200mm lens. The samples below illustrate this concept of altered perspective.
Because of this altered perspective based upon the choice of lens, I shake my head at times when people say buy a 50mm lens and use "foot zoom" power. To do so ignores the different perspective available and really, a different way of seeing the world than just one lens and its same perspective all the time. No drama, no "edge" that can result from experimenting. For the shot below, I was within a few feet of the couple using a 16mm fisheye lens to capture the goings on around them.
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