Learning to Photograph - Volume 1

03

Optics and Lenses

»Best wide-angle lens? Two steps backward. Look for the aha.« Ernst Haas, Austrian-American photographer

Let’s start with the part of photography that doesn’t actually rely on a camera, or more specifically, that doesn’t require a light-sensitive medium. It is concerned only with the reproduction of an image, not with storage of visual data. Some elementary physics are necessary to understand the properties of light and its relationship to color and how these concepts play out in photography. After all, at its root, photography is drawing with light.

For light to form an image, a lens needs to capture light and direct it to ...