By MICHAEL PERKINS
THE FIRST TIME I HEARD ANOTHER PHOTOGRAPHER REFER TO "art glass" I thought he was referring to a Hollywood talent agent. I guess I thought that using the modifier "art" to any reference to a lens was, at the very least, kind of a "duh" redundancy, since lenses serve no other purpose but to abet art. From wide-angles to superzooms, we program the way we choose to record the world based on the particular optic we choose. And within those choices are two very different additional paths to the pictures we are trying to create.
These paths begin with the selection of either an affect lens or an effect lens. If an optic helps shape an idea by enhancing its successful execution, it affects the outcome, but may not completely shape it. For example, faster lenses, or ones with a very deep focal length, help determine how a shot will come out, but the shot is not about that look per se. The opposite is true with an effect lens, where the special properties of enhancement or distortion inherent in the optic (fisheyes, macros, selective focus) can have a truly active role in shaping the final product, even going so far as to having that product be about the unique look created by the lens. Affect lenses are aides: effect lenses can do that, too, but also be the leading voice in an image, becoming, in fact, its content.
The image seen here was taken with an extreme wide-angle, a f/2.8 TTArtisan 10mm fisheye, and the hardest part of working with such a lens is not letting it run away with you, and having the picture be all about, "wow, that really looks weird, man", which is the rabbit hole that you can easily go down with an "effect" lens. For the record, there was an actual objective in shooting a gas station with this lens, which was to emphasize the wing-like contours of its architecture, something that is lost in a conventional street view of the structure, but which can be brought out through dramatic distortion at a particular vantage point. Of course, whether the fisheye helps me show what I'm seeking to show, or eclipses it with its extreme strangeness, is for others to judge. Part of me, for example, says that if I have to write a paragraph explaining what I was going for, I've already lost the argument. Up to you.
We often use glass as both "AFs" and "EFs" at the same time, and it can be frustrating when we are intending one thing and winding up with something completely different. But that's merely another part of the journey we're on in these pages: teaching the eye to not only see, but to choose the visual language essential to sharing out that vision.
No comments:
Post a Comment