Hardware

     Since I was opting to use more professional equipment for this project, I had a few things to learn.

    A friend of mine shared with me a slideshow she created about DSLRs and lenses for her underclassman TV students, and it helped me understand cameras more than I did before.

    She explained to me how different lenses will affect the field of view of a shot, and how that would consequently affect how the image is distorted.

    Certain types of distortion I was already familiar with. Logically, I already knew that wider fields of view created more horizontally compressed images in order to compensate for a static screen size. I was also familiar with the fact that closer proximity to the lens itself exaggerates the noticeability of the distortion. However, there was one thing she mentioned that I had never thought about, which is how different focal lengths can make objects appear closer or farther from each other.

    An example she showed me of this was with the two photos above. She explained to me that she purposely chose a wide angle lens for the photo on the right because it made the two subjects look much farther apart than they really were. In reality, they were like two feet away from each other, which came as a surprise to me.

    In contrast, she showed me two photos taken on a telephoto lens. In both, she reminded me that the trees in the background look a lot closer to the subjects than they truly were. This made me think a lot about how choosing a specific lens could be done with purpose to create meaning or to tackle certain hindrances of a shoot.

    The comparison here is what really opened my eyes (figuratively and literally because I was actually pretty shocked). On the left is a wide angle, while on the right is telephoto.

    See, the way I had thought about it before was that if this was a wide focal length:

    a photo taken with a telephoto lens would just look like...

that. Practically just a zoom in.

    However, the difference between these two becomes quite noticeable when you notice how far away the children look from each other depending on the lens used. 

 

   I guess that my previous thought process just aligns with the way you would refer to shots compositionally, where the terms wide shot, mid shot, and close up really just refer to how much of the scene is in frame at the moment. 

Notes on shots and angles

    Basically I thought lenses just did that, without taking into account how their distortion might change the look/feel of a particular shot. From here on, though, I will be able to choose lenses strategically to best suit each scenario I'm shooting.