Ed Schlotzhauer

An artists journey

Tag: art

Choose Your Style
Many photographers wonder if they have a style, especially if they are fairly new to the game. Do you ever look at the wonderful work other photographers are publishing and think it would best to choose your style to be like them? Don’t.
What is considered a style?
There is no hard and fast rule that defines what a “style” is. To some, it is the type of subjects you shoot. That is, they see little or no difference between style and genre. Here is another list, longer almost to the point of being absurd, but still talking mostly about what the subject is.
Others refer to photographic style as the effects you use to make your final picture. Our phones have an abundance of them. You can find many sets of “styles” available to purchase for use in LIghtroom Classic or Photoshop. They are mostly shortcuts for making your picture look a lot like another artist’s work.
More advanced authors extend the concept to include not only what you shoot, but how you shoot it..This is starting to get to the point.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
My view
When you look at some famous photographer’s work, can you make a good guess who made the image? That is because they have an established and recognizable style.
In my view, style is not as much about what you shoot as it is about what the final image looks like. This final image is not only a function of what the subject is and how you “treat” it to get the look you want, but how you were thinking about it, and the lens you choose and how you frame and compose and expose it. In other words, your own viewpoint on it.
You have a point of view, the way you see the world around you that is different from anyone else. This determines your style. It comes naturally.
That is why, when you see a print of a grand landscape with superb detail and the blue sky printed almost to black, there is a good chance that is Ansel Adams. When you see another black & white image, but blurred in a long time exposure and overall very dark, it may well be a Cole Thompson. Those things are not certain, but they have a defined style.
Can you copy one?
One of the ways we learn is to copy. It is instructive, and can be fun, to try on the style of famous artists to see if it “fits” us. We may find bits and pieces that we adopt.
But most of the time we will decide soon that that was instructive, but I’m done with it. Maybe we’ll go off to copy someone else for a while.
Ask yourself why you are copying someone else’s style. Is it because you admire their work and want to explore it in more depth? Are you really searching and trying to figure out what your style is? Is it because one is “popular” and you think it will help you to sell more?
I can’t question your motives, but I can predict that you will eventually give up trying to copy a style and settle down to doing your own work. It is hard to just copy. You are faking it. Besides, in a new situation, how would you copy someone if you haven’t seen any similar work they have done?
©Ed Schlotzhauer
How do you develop yours?
In most cases, you don’t. What you do is shoot a lot. Cartier-Bresson said your first 10,000 photos are the worst. I think one of the things he was telling us is that we have to experiment a lot to find out who we are.
Yes, we can copy other people’s styles to see if we can learn anything from them. If we are lucky, we might have good mentor to give us honest feedback. But ultimately, it is up to each of us to figure out who we are as artists.
I believe a style is something we look back on and discover. It is not something we plan to get to someday.
Look in your image catalog
How do we know if we have a style and understand what it is? A good start is examining your image catalog. I am using Lightroom terminology, but it applies to whatever sorting and filing system you use.
I assume you have a system for grading your images. You know which you consider your best. Have you put together portfolios? Small collections of your very best work organized by subject or project or location, for instance. If not, pick out, say, your 50 best images. Be brutal. This is important and you do not have to show them to anyone else.
Now go through them carefully and examine them from the point of view of what they can tell you about your artistic likes and beliefs. Are most of them landscapes? Are they predominantly square cropped or black & white or low key? Can you see that your favorite pictures are typically shot with a certain lens?
What about the subject matter? Are your favorites more likely to be a rusty truck than a portrait? Do you favor highly detailed or very simple? Sharp or intentional camera movement (ICM)? Travel locations or mostly close to home?
There are too many questions to enumerate. The idea is to look at this body of work and figure out who you are as an artist. This is you. This is your style. It certainly does not mean this is all you can do. It is just what you naturally gravitate to.
Now you can stop trying to be someone else and concentrate on developing yourself.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Be who you are
This is a very enlightening exercise. You will probably come away thinking “wow, I have a style!” It can be very hard for us to think about and accept our style. That is just something that other people have. People who are real artists.
But yes, you do have a style. It is unique to you, so there is no need to try to copy someone else’s. Your point of view and values will come through in your images, if you are being honest with yourself.
Here is a recent personal example. I was watching a video by a photographer talking about his style. It wasn’t very interesting to me and I was about to turn it off when he said something that caught me. He said he understands his style to be very simple. He is a portrait photographer and he uses simple lighting, plain backgrounds, and basic head shot poses.
That lit up something in me. I hadn’t considered something like simplicity a dimension of style.
I did the exercise I recommended above and saw clearly for the first time that I like complexity, detail, extremes of color and contrast and action. That is a common thread through many of my favorite images.
What does it mean? Nothing in itself. It is just some insight on my work. But I understand myself a little better now. I will be less surprised when I see I am being drawn to these.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Choose your style
I started with the notion of whether or not we should choose our style. I hope I have established that you don’t really choose your style. Your style chooses you. You can imitate someone else’s style for a while for the education and experience, but ultimately we find ourselves drawn back to what comes naturally to us.
Don’t fight it. Don’t worry about it. Relax. Be yourself.
But to be yourself, you have to continually learn and practice and improve. It is a lifelong quest.
March 12, 2025
It’s Just a Camera
That piece of technology we use to make images, it’s just a camera. Not magic or sentient or automatic. It still needs someone to take the picture.
Brushes
I really like my camera. It is a good tool to use to make images I like. When I’m in the field, my camera is the vehicle for my creative expression.
Have you ever had someone look at one of your pictures and say “Wow, you must have a great camera”? Or see you taking pictures and say “You must be a professional, since you have a big camera.” I have. Many times. Now, I basically just smile and go on.
But if you see a painting hanging in a gallery, who looks for the artist and tells them “Man, those must be some great brushes you have.” Or, seeing a nice wood carving, tell the sculptor “you must have some really sharp chisels”.
The public has a tendency to attribute a good photograph to the camera more than to the photographer. Being a piece of technology, somehow there is the implication that the camera somehow made the picture.
As artists, we should not encourage this attitude.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
A box
At it’s most basic, a camera is a box that keeps out light. The name comes from “camera obscura”, which was a dark space, often a room, with a small opening to let in light. This caused an inverted and reversed image to be projected on the back wall. It is believed this technique has been used since 500 BC.
The first “modern” cameras were wooden boxes that had a lens on one end and a holder for coated glass plates on the other. This is how many great historical photographs were exposed.
They have certainly become much more sophisticated now, with auto focus, camera shake compensation, exposure measurement, ability to automatically set exposure parameters, etc. Too much to list. The user manual for my Nikon Z7 II is 823 pages. Astounding, but it still doesn’t take the pictures. At it’s most basic, it is still a closed box to keep light off the sensor until time to record the image.
I appreciate many of the features in modern cameras. They make my art easier and extend the range I can operate in. It is great to have our little “dark spaces” getting smaller all the time. Even to becoming little flat things we can put in our pocket (phone).
I fear there will come a point where we will face some major decisions.
It’s still a tool
Right now our cameras and phones have amazing capabilities. Some of them are just basic technological advances. Some are deemed “AI”. Many of the best features are appearing first in our phones.
The ability to “sweep” our phone across a scene and have it automatically stitch together a panorama is very useful. Face detection is common now and can be useful for some types of work. An interesting feature I have seen is where, when taking a group shot, some cameras actually take many images and pick out and merge together the “best” look for everyone. At least, ones when they are smiling and their eyes are open.
Features like these make shooting pictures less technical and less stressful. Anyone can get “professional” level results. That is probably a good thing. It is an aid.©Ed Schlotzhauer
A coming “revolution”
There are still some of us who want to make the artistic decisions ourselves. Even if it is difficult and requires lots of training. Even if we make mistakes and bad choices. Those don’t matter. It is our art, our decisions, our responsibility. The technology is likely to get a lot more intrusive.
Probably right now most major camera manufacturers and all phone makers have teams of smart people trying to go all in with AI. People who actually believe in it and confidently think AI actually is or will become intelligent. Some who actually think AI can do art.
I can imagine one of the user stories they are working from: “(Camera speaking) Attach the 24-70 lens. It is best for this shot. Move me 34.7 inches left and lower me 9.3 inches. I detect a glare. Attach the lens hood. Place the subject at the Rule of Thirds point I am illuminating in the viewfinder. I will shoot it now and remove the non-subject person traversing the frame. I am also correcting the 3° tilt to the right and the overall color. Done. “
To me, this is a dystopian scene. I do not want to relinquish my artistic vision to anything, especially a machine. I am very willing to use smart tools to assist my work. In-camera features like eye identification and focus tracking can be very handy. On the computer, making it easier to make selections or to remove distractions is useful. But I do not plan to give control over to the camera to make it’s own decisions
Plasticity.
In The Interior Landscape, Guy Tal states
For any medium to be useful to an artist, it must allow a generous degree of plasticity. It must lend itself readily to subjective expression of concepts and feelings originating in the artist’s mind and not just those inherent in or commonly associated with the subject.
Mr. Tal was not referring to AI here, but I believe it applies. An AI controlled camera could probably expose images that would be regarded by most consumers as pleasing. The pictures would be a faithful and well exposed depiction of the subject. Most users would be happy. Unfortunately, the AI could not know the subjective expressions that are in my mind. It cannot know my vision and intent.
Again in The Interior Landscape, Guy Tal states
There are well-established compositional templates knows to impress viewers, requiring only mechanical skills but no expressive intent. Art raises the bar. Art requires from the artist a degree of emotional investment and an elevated subjective experience, as well as the skill to express visual concepts beyond “here’s something pretty,” “look where I’ve been,” or”see how lucky I was”.
I resonate with this concept of plasticity. It gives structure to my desire to create images that are not simply representations of what is there. I want to use the camera and other parts of the technology of photography simply as tools to help me capture what I visualize and feel.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Make art
You might get the impression that I am not a fan of AI. Well, I definitely am not a true believer. It could be a useful tool for some things. One of the big problems is that most people do not understand its limitations, so they believe it is something it is not.
By it’s nature, AI cannot be creative. It is a compendium of what it has been trained on. The output of AI is a statistical prediction of a response given an input. So, at best, it is an average of what it has been given. It cannot think or feel or have inspiration.
I am a human. I do think, get depressed, find inspiration, feel love, and see things in my own quirky way. If those are faults compared to AI, then I readily admit to being deeply flawed. But from those flaws, and all the other strange bits of my makeup, I can create art. Because my art comes from my unique human understanding and viewpoint.
I like my camera. It is a great tool. I have actually read most of the user manual in order to know what features it has and to pick which I choose to use. The reality is that I probably only use, I would guess, less than 20% of its capabilities. That’s OK. It’s a tool, not the center of my attention.
I know that designs have gotten so good that camera manufacturers are up against boundaries of physics. It is easier to add value through new “intelligent” tricks than to expand resolution or dynamic range or reduce noise. AI is a hype magnet and a path of least resistance. I get it.
Who/What is in charge?
But if the next camera I select is bloated with AI features and the price is double because of that, I will pass. I can even envision them wanting me to pay a monthly subscription to use the features in my new camera. If these things happen, my next camera is likely to be an older, used camera with less features but better raw performance and easier manual operation. Yeah, I’m an old curmudgeon. I get to be. I’m the artist in charge.
The camera does not make images. The artist does. It will continue that way for me as long as I have something to say about it. And I do. 🙂
So modern cameras are wonderful tools. I would love to have a new one. But are you an artist or just someone who takes pictures? If you are an artist, do not forget that the camera is basically just a dark box that holds the lens and sensor in the right positions. It is an instrument allowing us to create art. The artistic intelligence is in you. Do not surrender your artistic vision to a machine.
Photography is based on technology more than most other arts. That does not mean the technology makes the art.
“The equipment of Alfred Stieglitz or Edward Weston represents less in cost and variety than many an amateur ‘can barely get along with.’ Their magnificent photographs were made with intelligence and sympathy – not with merely the machines.”
Ansel Adams
February 12, 2025
Being a Tourist
Yeah, we’re highly trained and experienced photographers who always take “serious” photographs (whatever those are). But do you ever find yourself being a tourist? I recommend it as a balance to our vision.
Tourist
Tourism is huge business. Especially after Covid restrictions people seem to be in a frenzy of wanting to travel. So much so that it has become a problem for popular areas. And many people are just rotten and inconsiderate tourists. Don’t be a bad tourist. I am not discussing any of these issues. Just the subjective point of view of a tourist.
Tourists queue in front of the Louvre in Paris in 2017. The museum shut down for one day earlier this year after employees walked out due to overcrowding (Credit: Getty Images)
I have written before about how I like to travel. This is a different take on it.
The desire for travel and tourism seems to be inherent in most of us. It is a longing to explore and experience new and different things.I liked this definition of what a tourist is:
In simple terms, a tourist is an individual who embarks on a journey to explore new places, experience different cultures, and seek relaxation or adventure. They are the adventurers, the beachcombers, the culture enthusiasts, and the thrill-seekers. They are the ones who venture beyond their everyday lives to discover the wonders that the world has to offer.
As a photographer
All of those things can be true of a tourist, but a photographer may have additional objectives. I realize that many people on vacation only want to take selfies and classic tourist shots of iconic places. Nothing wrong with that if it is what gives you pleasure. But I am discounting it here, because I have additional goals and, if you are reading this, I figure you do too.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Whether traveling or being in my home area, I want to shoot images that reflect my vision. That bring a unique and different perspective on what I am seeing. This can be a challenge as a tourist. We are in unfamiliar territory seeing new sights with perhaps a tight schedule or even the dreaded “group tours” to deal with.
If we are traveling to a distant location for vacation, we probably cannot justify taking all the gear we would like to have. We may have language and transportation challenges to overcome. And we may not be in full control of our schedule.
Ultimately, unless you are one of the fortunate ones who can plan a multiple week stay in one location, we are under real or perceived time pressure. I hope you do not plan one of those “6 countries in 5 days” trips. But even with a more leisurely schedule, we know we have places to go and things to see in the time we have.
This means we do not usually have the luxury of settling in and getting to know an area. To find the rhythms and pace of the place. To learn to see beyond the superficial. We are a tourist.
Out of control
In effect, this renders us out of control. We have to live with the schedule and the travel arrangements and the lighting and the weather and whatever other conditions you encounter. Usually we cannot say “I will come back tomorrow to get a better shot”. Tomorrow we are likely to be someplace else.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
And in this situation it is very hard to have a feel for what is good. Everything is different from our normal experience. Wow, what a great street scene we think. But in reality it is mediocre at best. If we looked around or spent much more time we could do much better. But we don’t know because we do not know what to expect and what is good and bad and we are pressed for time.
We know that if we could control the circumstances better we could make better images. But we usually can’t do that.
If you are a control-oriented person, this will be extremely frustrating. I am not a controlling person, I tend to take things as they come, but it can still be quite annoying even to me.
Out of your comfort zone
Being a tourist in an unfamiliar area puts us out of our comfort zone. Everything is new and calling to us to be photographed. It is hard to take more than standard tourist shots, because we do not have time to think much about each subject. We may not have the chance to walk around it to view it from different viewpoints or contemplate it at leisure before having to rush off to the next sight. And we seldom have the chance to compare it to other similar scenes to find the best one.
Dealing with this and making shots we will be happy with when we get home takes a lot of discipline. We have to learn to be flexible and able to respond to circumstances instead of carefully planning and controlling our shoots.
Strategies
I have informally developed some strategies I use to try to survive in these situations. Let me cover it with disclaimers: these kind of work for me; no guarantee they will be right for you. As always, these are descriptive, not prescriptive. I do not believe in dictating a methodology to anyone.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
When you are a tourist, everything is interesting. Go ahead and shoot that tourist shot. You will want it for the memory. Now that that is out of the way, pause and look for the more interesting thing. That may be a detail of the main subject. It may be something totally different if you turn around and look. If you are on a dreaded group tour, spend time scanning for interesting shots while the guide is describing the current historical monument.
I try to go with some project ideas in mind. This helps to channel my thoughts away from just the tourist views to some themes I will be paying attention to. On a recent trip to France my themes I tried to keep in mind were: antiquity, Joie de vivre, trees, devoted to God, and think B&W. It is not that I was actively working on these project ideas. Just that they gave me a framework for considering the sights I encountered. I find doing this gives me more focus and helps me avoid running off randomly in all directions.
And I try to get into a kind of flow state. I am unlikely to truly achieve flow, but I can approximate is by being tuned in to what is happening around me. The goal is a heightened sense of awareness. In this mode I recognize a possible shot more quickly and can be ready to react to it. I want to be shooting instinctively for fast moving situations and more meditatively when possible.
Being mindful
I know it doesn’t sound like it from what I said above, but I think the thing that helps is to be very mindful. Experience openly and freely, but keep the analysis running in the background. Take it all in but be very conscious of how you are reacting to it. Quickly reinterpret what you are seeing through your own vision filter.
Remember, as a tourist you are breaking out of the ordinary. Use that you your advantage. Shake up your habits.
We all tend to form habits. Talking about photography, John Szarkowski referred to this as “habitual seeing” . Being a tourist everything is fresh and new. It is a great chance to break some habits and see things in a new way, flex your mental muscles. Try to bring this new found ability to see back as one of the important souvenirs of the trip.
In the definition I gave of a tourist above, one of the key words to me is “experience”. If we are mindful and actively trying to capture that experience we are more likely to get some images that represent how we felt and experienced the trip.
If it fails
Keep in mind I am suggesting that you be experimenting on what may be a big expensive trip. When you are trying something new, you may get worse results, not better. No guarantees.
My argument is: that’s OK. You’re not going on a National Geographic assignment where you are contractually obligated to bring back certain results. This is our art. We should always be experimenting. If you are disappointed with some of your results but you come back a better artist, isn’t that a win? It is for me. The experience is more important that the product we bring back. However, in my case, my wife is there beside me taking all the conventional selfies and tourist shots on her phone. So they will be there if I want to see them. 🙂
These shots of mine are all “tourist” images from a trip to France. Hopefully they are not just standard boring travel shots.
December 18, 2024
En Plein Air
This is a big buzz with my colleagues who manually put pigment on a substrate (e.g. they paint). There is an aura that makes it something exotic about creating “en plein air”. Actually, plein air is what I do, too.
Plein air
In itself, plein air art is not a new concept, or even an artistic concept. It has been done commonly by painters since the 1800’s.
It is sometimes spoken like an advanced technical term. Something your have to be an insider to truly appreciate. But it is just an everyday French phrase. I have been studying French recently (another story) and was surprised to find this in normal use. It literally means “plain air”, or outdoors. Nothing fancy or hidden there. If you go to a “plein air” concert it just means you are going to an outdoor concert.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
In painting
So if you are a painter and you gather up all your stuff and take it outside to paint scenes from nature or whatever is in front of you, you are painting “en plein air”. Does that make it different or special? Maybe. Monet thought so. I”ll talk about that in a minute.
But to give the painters credit, it required some technical and workflow innovations for this to happen. We forget history sometimes.
It used to be (pre-1800) that artists had to find or buy their own pigments. Then they had to purify them and laboriously grind them into an extremely fine powder and mix them in a binder, usually a type of oil. By the way, you know those beautiful warm, rust toned palettes favored by Renaissance artists in Italy? Ochre pigment was a common, naturally occurring mineral there. Coincidence?
But then, sometime in the early 1800’s, the technology for producing and selling pigments already ground and mixed and in tubes was developed. This allowed the artists two things: first, they could get any colors they wanted. But second, and more important for this discussion, it became much easier to take your oils with you. As the desire to move about grew, enterprising vendors also developed smaller, portable easels and pre-stretched prepared canvases. Artists were not tethered to a studio nearly so much.
Now artists could pack their gear into a relatively small bundle and go where they wanted. One of the places they moved was outside.
Monet
I find I use Monet as an example a lot. I like his work, but another thing is that he was an innovator and revolutionary. He fought the entrenched art establishment and helped establish a whole new style. Something photography is still struggling to some extent to do.
Monet was one of the early practitioners of the plein air movement. One of the motivations of the whole Impressionist movement was his and others desire to paint outdoor scenes in the light of the moment. As Guy Tal put it in his marvelous book The Interior Landscape, (I get no incentives for promoting it) “Monet famously credited the success of his work to the emotions he felt when working out in nature … As Monet himself put it, ‘My only merit lies in having painted directly in front of nature, seeking to render my impressions of the most fleeting effects.’ “
Working outside and observing fleeting effects. That’s what I like to do, too!
©Ed Schlotzhauer
I work outdoors
The same impulse motivates me, even though the technology I use is very different. I find and capture my images almost exclusively outdoors. Shooting in a studio does not motivate me.
Seeing things most other people do not see excites me. Finding those things, even if they are little, seemingly insignificant things, that I can show you in a new way gives me joy. Especially if I can show you something and you share my joy and excitement.
I admit I do not have the patience for painting. It’s too slow for me. Spending a few hours or days capturing a scene would be so frustrating to me that I would quickly give up. Seeing something, visualizing what this could be and what to do with it is hard and takes lots of experience. That is one of the fun and creative parts of photography to me. And it is fast enough to not bog me down or interrupt my creative flow. The process of capturing and producing the artifact doesn’t need to be so difficult.
Other than post processing work on my computer, my images come from outdoors, en plain air.
A new genre?
Have I created a new genre of art? Should I trademark the term “plein air photography”? Sign up for my workshop!
Well, I probably can’t do that. Photography has always been strongly associated with the outdoors. I think the first surviving photograph was an outdoor scene. Admittedly early photographs were outdoors because that’s where a good light source was available. Flash had not yet been invented. Even when it first was, it was difficult and dangerous to use (and smoky).
But those are technical considerations. The fact remains that photography has always had a strong connection to the outdoors. Especially for crazy people like me who photograph outside year around in a place like Colorado.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
It’s the outdoors that motivates me. I’m a hunter. That’s where I find most of my prey. And my inspiration. It is not an uncommon obsession. Look at publications like Luminous Landscape, Nature Photographer’s Network, Outdoor Photographer magazine and many others.
To the painters, if working outside motivates you, excellent. We share a common bond. I hope the outdoors inspires us both to do our best work. But working outdoors is not a new concept or unique to painting. Plein air just means “outside”.
I’ll be looking for you outside. But we will just pass each other. I’ll be moving about a lot discovering and shooting a lot of things while you are painting. Not to say one is better or worse, just very different art forms. Both en plein air. Let’s wave to each other.
December 11, 2024
The Magic of the Lens
Do you ever stop to think about your lenses, besides wanting a shinny new one? There is a magic of the lens that we seldom consider and perhaps do not even understand.
Many constraints
My perception is colored by my background as an engineer. I see a modern lens as serving so many constraints that it is a wonder they do the job as well as they do. We expect high resolving power and “good” bokah. It needs to have a good zoom range but be small. It must be weather sealed and rugged, but inexpensive. And, of course, issues like low chromatic aberration and great edge to edge sharpness and low distortion and minimal light falloff (vignetting) and minimum flare are all givens. Oh and blazing fast auto focus, too.
The poor lens designers are in a tight place. Luckily for them computer design tools have advanced greatly. Also, new materials are available to help overcome some of the design problems of the past.
Still though, we ask a lot of a professional grade lens. Probably more than we realize.
Simple lens
We have an idea in mind of how a lens works. You probably did an experiment in High School Physics with a simple lens. Then you took it out and fried some ants.
What we normally picture is a biconvex lens. Don’t let a fancy word scare you. That just means both sides are thicker in the middle than on the edge. Like this:
By DrBob at the English-language Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2065907
The rays (red lines) illustrate how the lens focuses on a point. That focusing is what images the outside world sharply onto our sensor.
This is true. It works. But nothing in life is simple anymore.
Reality
The reality is that, because of our high expectations and the piles of constraints to satisfy, real lens design has to be much more complex.
I am going to use the Nikon Z 24-120 f/4 zoom as an example. For two reasons: it is a representative high quality modern design, and I like it – a lot. It is my go-to lens for everyday use.
Lens design has gone far beyond the “simple” lens pictured above. Here is a cutaway of the Nikon lens:
Photography Life: https://photographylife.com/reviews/nikon-z-24-120mm-f-4-s
We can see that it has many lens elements (a word for a piece of glass in a lens) – 16 of them to be exact. Few of them are simple biconvex elements. Some of them are exotic glass. Things like high refractive index (they bend light more sharply than regular glass) or other properties. Some are aspherical. This means they are quite complex designs to achieve specific results. These are hard to design and manufacture. Usually they are necessary to correct for effects of other things and make the resulting image better.
Zoom
Let’s look at a few specific features. This lens has a 5x zoom range, from 24mm to 120mm. Now you would think that, for the lens to zoom 5x, it would have to get 5 times longer. This would be true for a straightforward design.
However, us users of the lens would not like that. It would have to be very big and bulky to do that. And it would be awkward when zoomed all the way out. It would be long and off balance the camera.
But complex design magic and some of those special lens elements allow them to shortcut physics. it zooms over the 5x range while only extending to less than twice it’s collapsed length. Amazing and very welcome.
Reflections
The real world is not a well behaved bundle of parallel rays coming into the lens, like in the simple lens picture above. Light is coming from everywhere. Most of it is what we want to end up on the sensor. But a lot isn’t. Light coming in from a sharp angle tends to “bounce around” inside the lens and cause a lowering of contrast. Kind of a fog look.
Modern lenses have special coatings on the glass and use some of the special types of glass i mentioned to fight this. These go a long way to canceling the reflections.
It used to be that shooting in the direction of a very bright source, like the sun would always cause unwanted internal reflections that degrade the image. Now it is amazing how little that happens. I really only worry about that if the sun is directly or nearly directly in view.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Chromatic aberration
Chromatic aberration is something we seldom consider, except when we are getting down to the last details of a final print. One of the nasty realities of physics is that each “color” of light is a different frequency. The amount of “bend” the lens gives to light is dependent on the color (frequency) of the light. This means not all the colors focus at the same point. That’s bad.
Have you every looked very closely at magnified blowup of a sharp edge in one of your photos? Especially if it is in a high contrast lighting situation. You may see a slight fringe of green or purple around the edge. This is called chromatic aberration. Not all the colors focusing together.
One of the purposes of the exotic glass and all the elements in modern lenses is to minimize this. They do a pretty good job.
But they are not perfect. Luckily it is a simple check box in Lightroom Classic to have the software automatically remove chromatic aberration.
Other considerations
If you ever carry a camera around all day you learn to appreciate light weight. Lens designers would like to design their lenses with a very sturdy metal shell and structure. But we would not like to carry that. Modern plastics and design techniques have allowed the designers to create our lenses at a more user friendly weight while still being sturdy enough to hold up to hard use. Thank you.
Did you know that some lenses make the light come into the sensor is a certain direction to make the sensor receive the photons better? Did you know that most of our zoom lenses, especially, have quite a bit of distortion and vignetting and resolution falloff at the edges? Those are some of the things that are part of the tradeoffs. But one reason they are traded off is there’s a bit of perceptual and software slight of hand.
First, we don’t notice it much. Really. We are not as sensitive to it as you would think. Unless you spend your time photographing test charts. Second, many of us set Lightroom Classic to look at the model of the lens and automatically apply a “correction” to the image we see. Adobe has a database of lenses with mathematical models to correct their distortions. This is a good thing.
As a matter of fact, Nikon has a special deal with Adobe such that the great Z 24-70 f/2.8 lens is automatically corrected in Lightroom Classic, whether or not the user selects that. It is impossible to defeat it. Hardware and software are joining in a symbiotic relationship. Making an image is a blend of both and it will only increase with time.
Almost everything done to solve one problem creates another. This is why designs are so complex and expensive. Everything is a tradeoff. It is all a question of how good can we make this property while not letting that other one get worse than a certain level.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Magic
I am in awe of these brilliant designers. They achieve beautiful balance. Like I said, I regularly use this example lens I have talked about and I am generally very happy with it. But let me emphasize that pure, unexcelled technical perfection is not usually my goal. A lens like this is “good enough” for 99.9% of my needs.
For me, as a user, I take the camera out and start using it. What I see and feel is more important than technology. Sometimes, though, my engineer nature kicks in and makes me marvel at the complexity. But really, I shoot and expect my great gear to capture what I want. And it usually does. Marvelous.
The magic of the. lens. Like most good magic, how it works is invisible to us. But occasionally stop to consider how lucky we are and what an incredible piece of technology we have attached to our camera body.
Feature image
The image at the top was shot with this Nikon Z 24-120mm f/4 zoom lens I have been using as an example. This is the Hotel de Ville in Paris – their Town Hall. You can’t really tell in this small jpg, but I am completely happy with the capabilities of this lens. If the opportunity arose I am sure I could make a very good 60″ print of this. Here is a section of it zoomed to 100%.
100% section, ©Ed Schlotzhauer
Let me assure you that I am not affiliated with or sponsored by Nikon. I am just using this nice lens that I use frequently as a representative example of what a modern zoom lens is and is capable of doing.
December 4, 2024