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:
“Systematic philosophical and practical anti-intellectualism such as we are witnessing appears to be something truly novel in the history of human culture.”
—Johan Huizinga (1872–1945)
“When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.”
—J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904–1967)
“They [women] can use their abilities to support each other, even as they develop more effective and appropriate ways of dealing with power.... Women do not need to diminish other women ... [they] need the power to advance their own development, but they do not “need” the power to limit the development of others.”
—Jean Baker Miller (20th century)
“Sickness sensitizes man for observation, like a photographic plate.”
—Edmond De Goncourt (1822–1896)
“The camera has an interest in turning history into spectacle, but none in reversing the process. At best, the picture leaves a vague blur in the observer’s mind; strong enough to send him into battle perhaps, but not to have him understand why he is going.”
—Denis Donoghue (b. 1928)
“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)