Is wide-angle over-used?

In rec.photo.digital RichA wrote:

Seems like that is what most people want first and foremost, except
perhaps wildlife shooters. Wide angle does have some weird attraction
to the human eye (maybe the perspective distortion reminds some of
pleasant drug-trips?) but it seems like in the last few years, it has
become too used in magazines. Maybe what we could use more of are
prime "normal" shots where the person made the effort to get far
enough away in order to frame what they wanted?

In the majority of my wide angle shots the only way to get further
back in order to use a less wide lens would be to demolish the
building at my back.

If the perspective distortion upsets you, move your eye closer to the
photograph. When the angle of view of the photograph to your eye is
the same as the angle of view of the camera lens in the original shot,
the perspective distortion will have disappeared.

--
Chris Malcolm

In rec.photo.digital John A. wrote:
On 17 Apr 2011 21:53:15 GMT, Chris Malcolm
wrote:

In rec.photo.digital RichA wrote:

Seems like that is what most people want first and foremost, except
perhaps wildlife shooters. Wide angle does have some weird attraction
to the human eye (maybe the perspective distortion reminds some of
pleasant drug-trips?) but it seems like in the last few years, it has
become too used in magazines. Maybe what we could use more of are
prime "normal" shots where the person made the effort to get far
enough away in order to frame what they wanted?

In the majority of my wide angle shots the only way to get further
back in order to use a less wide lens would be to demolish the
building at my back.

If the perspective distortion upsets you, move your eye closer to the
photograph. When the angle of view of the photograph to your eye is
the same as the angle of view of the camera lens in the original shot,
the perspective distortion will have disappeared.

OMG! How does it know?

Nothing needs to know anything. It's a simple consequence of
perspective geometry. You don't even need to understand lenses. It
works with pinhole cameras, i.e. every point on the image connected by
a straight line through the pinhole to the point in the world it's
imaging. That gives linear perspective projection where the
straightness of lines is preserved between world and image. Very
simple geometry.

Don't they teach this stuff at school any more?

--
Chris Malcolm

Nothing needs to know anything. It's a simple consequence of
perspective geometry. You don't even need to understand lenses. It
works with pinhole cameras, i.e. every point on the image connected by
a straight line through the pinhole to the point in the world it's
imaging. That gives linear perspective projection where the
straightness of lines is preserved between world and image. Very
simple geometry.

Don't they teach this stuff at school any more?

--
Chris Malcolm

Looks like they don't even teach one how to find out for oneself either!
You would have thought that with Wikipedia and Google.....

Cheers,
David

about: Is wide-angle over-used?;
On Sun, 17 Apr 2011 19:55:37 -0400, John A. wrote:


On 17 Apr 2011 21:53:15 GMT, Chris Malcolm
wrote:


If the perspective distortion upsets you, move your eye closer to the
photograph. When the angle of view of the photograph to your eye is
the same as the angle of view of the camera lens in the original shot,
the perspective distortion will have disappeared.

OMG! How does it know?

It's sorta like mirrors.
A mirror will reverse right and left but
not up and down.

So how does it know?

If the perspective distortion upsets you, move your eye closer to the
photograph. When the angle of view of the photograph to your eye is
the same as the angle of view of the camera lens in the original shot,
the perspective distortion will have disappeared.

Or is it when enough of the prerepheral image
disappears from sight, it mimics standard vision?
Just asking....





"Fascism should more properly be called
corporatism, since it is the *merger*
of state and corporate power."
- Benito Mussolini, father of fascism.

What does it look like?
Imagine an entity called: government/people.
Now Imagine an entity called: corporations/government.
What does each look like?

- Socialism: The government/people own the corporations.
- Fascism: The corporations/government own the people.

But
- U.S. Capitalism: The government/people regulate the
corporations.

In rec.photo.digital Crash! wrote:

about: Is wide-angle over-used?;
On Sun, 17 Apr 2011 19:55:37 -0400, John A. wrote:


On 17 Apr 2011 21:53:15 GMT, Chris Malcolm
wrote:

If the perspective distortion upsets you, move your eye closer to the
photograph. When the angle of view of the photograph to your eye is
the same as the angle of view of the camera lens in the original shot,
the perspective distortion will have disappeared.

OMG! How does it know?

It's sorta like mirrors.
A mirror will reverse right and left but
not up and down.

So how does it know?

If you stand on a mirror it reverses up and down and left and right :-)

If the perspective distortion upsets you, move your eye closer to the
photograph. When the angle of view of the photograph to your eye is
the same as the angle of view of the camera lens in the original shot,
the perspective distortion will have disappeared.

Or is it when enough of the prerepheral image
disappears from sight, it mimics standard vision?
Just asking....

You're allowed to move your eyes while keeping your head still, in
which case the effect can be observed right up to nearly 180 degrees
angle of view.

The whole idea of a standard angle of view being based on the optics
of the human eye is based on lots of assumptions which in turn are
based on some serious misunderstandings of how human vision works. The
angle of view of the sharply detailed central region in the human eye
is at most a few degrees, but something can be seen out of the corner
of the eye out to around an angle of view of 150 degrees or more. But
there's so much processing and stacking of the retinal images by the
brain that the simple optics of the eye are less important than many
who compare the eyeball to a camera suppose.

--
Chris Malcolm

In rec.photo.digital Whisky-dave wrote:
On Apr 21, 9:06*am, Chris Malcolm wrote:
In rec.photo.digital Crash! wrote:

about: Is wide-angle over-used?;
* On Sun, 17 Apr 2011 19:55:37 -0400, John A. wrote:

On 17 Apr 2011 21:53:15 GMT, Chris Malcolm
wrote:

If the perspective distortion upsets you, move your eye closer to the
photograph. When the angle of view of the photograph to your eye is
the same as the angle of view of the camera lens in the original shot,
the perspective distortion will have disappeared.

OMG! How does it know?

It's sorta like mirrors. *
A mirror will reverse right and left but
not up and down.
* So how does it know?

If you stand on a mirror it reverses up and down and left and right :-)

If the perspective distortion upsets you, move your eye closer to the
photograph. When the angle of view of the photograph to your eye is
the same as the angle of view of the camera lens in the original shot,
the perspective distortion will have disappeared.
Or is it when enough of the prerepheral image
disappears from sight, it mimics standard vision?
Just asking....

You're allowed to move your eyes while keeping your head still, in
which case the effect can be observed right up to nearly 180 degrees
angle of view.

But that not really a true angle of view is it if you have to move the
optics
to achieve it. If you put a 1000mm lens on a tripod you get a 360 deg
view if you spin it around. ;-)

Cameras have the design aim of getting detailed resolution over the
whole sensor area, whereas human eyes have the design aim of achieving
apparent high resolution views by very fast movements of a very small
high resolution area over the interesting parts of the view, which the
brain stitches together.

The whole idea of a standard angle of view being based on the optics
of the human eye is based on lots of assumptions which in turn are
based on some serious misunderstandings of how human vision works. The
angle of view of the sharply detailed central region in the human eye
is at most a few degrees,

I though it was 15-20...

At usual newspaper reading distances it's not enough to encompass the
width of one long printed word. A saccadic shift of view is required
to see all the letters sharply enough to identify a spelling mistake.

but something can be seen out of the corner
of the eye out to around an angle of view of 150 degrees or more.

Our peripheral vision is faster acting but less detailed than our
central vision
this was apparently so we could quickly detect preditors approaching.
Some animals have greater sensitivity and alsosee less colours
something to do with rods and cones IIRC.

But
there's so much processing and stacking of the retinal images by the
brain that the simple optics of the eye are less important than many
who compare the eyeball to a camera suppose.

Yes opur brain also fills in details and makes assumptions especially
about colour
that's what makes optical illusions so interesting and magicians
successful.

And why you can't compare angles of view between cameras and eyes
without making so many simplifying assumptions that there are always
plenty of commonplace examples which make nonsense of any specific
prescription of a standard normal human angle of view.

--
Chris Malcolm

In rec.photo.digital John A. wrote:
On 18 Apr 2011 23:15:14 GMT, Chris Malcolm
wrote:
In rec.photo.digital John A. wrote:
On 17 Apr 2011 21:53:15 GMT, Chris Malcolm
wrote:
In rec.photo.digital RichA wrote:

Seems like that is what most people want first and foremost, except
perhaps wildlife shooters. Wide angle does have some weird attraction
to the human eye (maybe the perspective distortion reminds some of
pleasant drug-trips?) but it seems like in the last few years, it has
become too used in magazines. Maybe what we could use more of are
prime "normal" shots where the person made the effort to get far
enough away in order to frame what they wanted?

In the majority of my wide angle shots the only way to get further
back in order to use a less wide lens would be to demolish the
building at my back.

If the perspective distortion upsets you, move your eye closer to the
photograph. When the angle of view of the photograph to your eye is
the same as the angle of view of the camera lens in the original shot,
the perspective distortion will have disappeared.

OMG! How does it know?

Nothing needs to know anything. It's a simple consequence of
perspective geometry. You don't even need to understand lenses. It
works with pinhole cameras, i.e. every point on the image connected by
a straight line through the pinhole to the point in the world it's
imaging. That gives linear perspective projection where the
straightness of lines is preserved between world and image. Very
simple geometry.

Don't they teach this stuff at school any more?

LOL. Sorry. Thermos joke.

Yeah, I get it. I once managed to write a rudimentary ray-tracing
program that displayed images using 80x25 16-color CGA text mode,
dithered by using spaces and characters 176 through 178 and 219.
( http://telecom.tbi.net/asc-ibm.html ) I later upgraded it to 80x50
characters when I got hold of a VGA adapter. All before I ever took a
trig class. (The whole like-triangles thing just kinda clicked in my
head.) I think I had it able to render in a few graphics modes too,
but it's been over 20 years and my memory's a little fuzzy.

I also had done a wireframe model renderer as a teen, but only
projected the endpoints. IIRC, I had asked a neighbor who was studying
architecture for help with a formula to rotate a point with X,Y
coordinates about another point so many degrees and return a new set
of coordinates. He came up with a method that found the angle &
distance, added the rotational angle, and calculated the new
coordinates from that. It seemed slow to me, so I thought about it for
a while and realized it would be much faster just to rotate the
component vectors and add the results.

Thanks for reminding me of all this. Really takes me back.

Me too -- I had to write a complete digital image processor more than
thity years ago, when we got our digital images by running the output
of a video camera through an analogue to digital converter. I think it
took me about six months. Usually 65K monochrome images, i.e. 0.065
megapixels. Porting the image from camera through sundry boxes into
the image processor took around five minutes. And in order to get a
printed digital image we photographed the video screen with a large
format Polaroid camera.

--
Chris Malcolm

Chris Malcolm wrote:


In rec.photo.digital Whisky-dave wrote:
On Apr 21, 9:06*am, Chris Malcolm wrote:
In rec.photo.digital Crash! wrote:

about: Is wide-angle over-used?;
* On Sun, 17 Apr 2011 19:55:37 -0400, John A. wrote:

......................


Yes opur brain also fills in details and makes assumptions especially
about colour
that's what makes optical illusions so interesting and magicians
successful.

And why you can't compare angles of view between cameras and eyes
without making so many simplifying assumptions that there are always
plenty of commonplace examples which make nonsense of any specific
prescription of a standard normal human angle of view.

Yet a 55mm lens seems normal.
Yet usually so does a 28 or a 105. ...almost.
.....normal to perception, the brain-stiched.

But I had always assume the 55mm was based
on similar math to an eye. No?

In rec.photo.digital Crash! wrote:
Chris Malcolm wrote:

In rec.photo.digital Whisky-dave wrote:
On Apr 21, 9:06*am, Chris Malcolm wrote:
In rec.photo.digital Crash! wrote:

about: Is wide-angle over-used?;
* On Sun, 17 Apr 2011 19:55:37 -0400, John A. wrote:

.....................

Yes opur brain also fills in details and makes assumptions especially
about colour
that's what makes optical illusions so interesting and magicians
successful.

And why you can't compare angles of view between cameras and eyes
without making so many simplifying assumptions that there are always
plenty of commonplace examples which make nonsense of any specific
prescription of a standard normal human angle of view.

Yet a 55mm lens seems normal.
Yet usually so does a 28 or a 105. ...almost.
....normal to perception, the brain-stiched.

But I had always assume the 55mm was based
on similar math to an eye. No?

What maths? I've explained why the maths is basically incomparable.

--
Chris Malcolm
"Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss
events. Small minds discuss people." Eleanor Roosevelt.