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| Creeping Up On The Tomatoes: My wide open 16mm f/2.8 Minolta semi-fisheye lens was only eight inches from the counter’s edge. My efforts certainly bore fruit! |
While I can absorb a lot of vital information from handling cameras, studying instruction books, or reading POPULAR PHOTOGRAPHY & IMAGING, shooting pictures and examining results helps me more.
I get stir crazy working at my desk. Even brief weekend picture-taking sessions, photographing birthday parties, or shooting portraits for friends don’t provide sufficient satisfaction and won’t teach me as much as I want to know. Get me out of there!
“Out of there” for me can take many forms, but essentially there are three regular trips that give me the best photo chances of breaking free:
a) Yearly visits to the West Coast to visit friends and the central-California wine country.
b) Escapes from photo trade shows when they’re held in photographically interesting U.S. cities such as New Orleans and Las Vegas.
c) Multiweek holidays tooling around Europe every other year after being incarcerated and reporting on the biannual Photokina trade show in Cologne, Germany (check out POPPHOTO.com for our show coverage).
When I’m very lucky, some manufacturer may hand me a fascinating new camera, film, or lens prior to my departure and ask me to try it out.
Post-Photokina, last October, I left for Spain and London armed with Tamron’s super-compact 28–300mm f/3.5–6.3 XR lens, which I reported on last month (quickie, condensed evaluation: for travel, the Tamron’s convenience outweighs possibly better short zoom or single-focal-length performance).
In years past, I had photographed Barcelona’s fabulous La Boqueria food market, but had come to the conclusion that it was well-nigh impossible to show the immense variety of colorful edibles in any large market in a visually dynamic way. I had used the widest-angle lens I had, but nearly every object in the frames looked tiny and uninteresting.
The widest-angle lens available for 35mm cameras is the 12mm f/5.6 Voigtländer Heliar, which covers a picture diagonal of 121 degrees, and focuses to 121/4 inches. For SLRs, there are a number of 14mm lenses covering 114 degrees.
My approach would be radically different. Instead of sticking to true perspective, I’d come in superclose, to within inches of the center of my subject, using a full-frame fisheye lens that covers 180 degrees and close-focuses to eight inches. The rest of the fruit extending toward the outside of the lens’ view would still appear large. The shape of the individual pieces of food would hide the increasing curves of the outer lens picture area unavoidable with fisheye lenses. The horizontal curved edges of the fruit counter would hold the composition together.
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