History and Technical Development of Photographic Camera Lenses
The problems of creating a lens that would cover a large flat image plane were well known even before the invention of photography. Lenses had already been developed to work with the focal plane of the camera obscura, a device for projecting images used as a novelty and an artist's drawing aid, and had been around for hundreds of years. Since the invention of photography many types of lenses have been tried. The succession of designs was never uniform since an older design that performed a task the photographer needed (such as working better portrait versus landscape, working at the wavelength of light the film collected, etc.) would still be used in unison with newer designs. Even today the job the lens needs to do, the laws of physics, the limits of engineering, as well as the practical considerations of size, weight and cost, means there are many designs available.
| Some lens aberration encountered by early photographers | |||||||||
|
|||||||||
Read more about this topic: Camera Lens
Famous quotes containing the words history, technical, development, photographic, camera and/or lenses:
“Anyone who is practically acquainted with scientific work is aware that those who refuse to go beyond fact rarely get as far as fact; and anyone who has studied the history of science knows that almost every great step therein has been made by the “anticipation of Nature.””
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)
“The best work of artists in any age is the work of innocence liberated by technical knowledge. The laboratory experiments that led to the theory of pure color equipped the impressionists to paint nature as if it had only just been created.”
—Nancy Hale (b. 1908)
“Dissonance between family and school, therefore, is not only inevitable in a changing society; it also helps to make children more malleable and responsive to a changing world. By the same token, one could say that absolute homogeneity between family and school would reflect a static, authoritarian society and discourage creative, adaptive development in children.”
—Sara Lawrence Lightfoot (20th century)
“... the most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads—as an anthology of images.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.”
—Dorothea Lange (1895–1979)
“Life is a train of moods like a string of beads, and, as we pass through them, they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue, and each shows only what lies in its focus.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)