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Expanding & Compressing Space #93

Expanding & Compressing Space #93

Expanding & Compressing Space #93



Photo Tips Podcast: Expanding &  Compressing Space #93

One of the things I talk a lot about is the expansion and compression of space. By that I mean the relative size of objects to one another based on their relative distance. For instance, if you put your thumb next to your eye then it seems much larger than things in the distance. And conversely, if you put your thumb very far from your eye, your thumb will appear to be smaller than that thing in the distance. Although I often say that you can expand or compress space by zooming in and out, in other words changing your focal length, I am aware that in reality it does not actually expand or compress space, it only feels like it’s doing that. The only way to expand or compress space is to change the relative distance between you and the foreground object or the foreground and background objects or a combination of both. So let me say it again, changing your lens in fact does not expand or compress space. However by changing your lens you are forced to moving your feet to fill up the frame differently and in that way you are expanding and compressing space because you are changing that relative distance. It should be noted that if you decide to just use one lens because you don’t want to be weighed down then it is likely that you will have to crop a very small portion of your photo to create the right framing with the right compression; it is highly likely that you will be cropping so much of your frame to achieve that compression that your resolution will be total crap. And this is why it’s useful to have a zoom lens, so that you use your optics to fill the frame rather than using cropping. And by the way, a group that recently traveled to Morocco with me let me know that I used that word crap so much that I should write a book entitled, it’s just crap. But I digress. I hope that was helpful.

 


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