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:
“There is nothing truer than myth: history, in its attempt to “realize” myth, distorts it, stops halfway; when history claims to have “succeeded” this is nothing but humbug and mystification. Everything we dream is “realizable.” Reality does not have to be: it is simply what it is.”
—Eugène Ionesco (b. 1912)
“In middle life, the human back is spoiling for a technical knockout and will use the flimsiest excuse, even a sneeze, to fall apart.”
—E.B. (Elwyn Brooks)
“Fascism, the more it considers and observes the future and the development of humanity, quite apart from political considerations of the moment, believes neither in the possibility nor the utility of perpetual peace.”
—Benito Mussolini (1883–1945)
“Sickness sensitizes man for observation, like a photographic plate.”
—Edmond De Goncourt (1822–1896)
“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)