Re: Wide angle lenses in 3-d

[John Roberts <roberts@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>Date: Thu, 16 Nov 1995 14:54:04 -0600
>From: fj834@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Dr. George A. Themelis)
>Subject: Wide angle lenses in 3-d

>I generally object to the misuse of wide-angle lenses in point-and-shoot 
>cameras.  Why is the goal to include everyone and everything in the 
>picture?  The result is cluttered pictures with a lot of distortion.  
>I mostly use my (wife's) P&S at the longer end.

I don't have any short focal length lenses (I do have one zoom lens that will
get down to 35mm), but judging from photographs by other people, I'd day that
short focal lengths can produce very good results with wide outdoor scenes,
for instance open fields or sunsets that spread across half of the sky.

Short focal lengths are less desirable for man-made objects, because these
often include straight lines, which come out visibly distorted when viewing
a flat print or slide (in 2D or 3D).

The worst possible application is pictures of people, taken from fairly close-up
(for instance in selecting a short lens to fit everybody in). People tend to
come out badly distorted, especially the heads. Unfortunately, newspaper
photographers do this frequently, even for the major newspapers.

I've been in publicity photos a number of times for my lab work, and I always
encourage the photographer to use at least a 75mm lens, or at least back off
a little. We had one photographer who was about 4.5 feet tall, who took a
photo of our group standing next to our equipment. She used a 28mm lens on
a 35mm SLR camera, set on a very low tripod looking up at us. As expected,
we came out with large stomachs and small heads. :-)

John R


------------------------------