Project 5: Photography I Space Exercise 6: Zoom

This exercise was more challenging than I anticipated, and, therefore, has been quite time consuming. The task sounded quite simple: to find a view with depth and take a series of 5 or 6 photos, gradually zooming in. Then to create a final image for my sequence.

I found a place in the park’s walled garden which I thought would work well, as there is a series of wooden structures, against which plants have been trained, along a path which leads to the arched exit from the garden. Initially I saw it when I was out without my camera, so I took a series of images on my phone. I didn’t plan to use them for this exercise but I wanted to get a feel for whether the choice of location would work 

I didn’t choose any particular settings for these photos, except for gradually zooming in. I had two sources of frustration: firstly, the lines or the vertical struts, the cross pieces and the paving slabs were all at different angles. It was hard to compose the photos because if I lined up any one of these with the frame, the others were out of alignment, yet so close that the mismatched angles are really noticeable. Secondly, as I zoomed in, the images quickly became increasingly blurry.  Whilst zooming in enables the capture of an image at a distance, the downside is a tendency towards a blurry image, particularly with digital zoom. 

‘Where optical zoom magnifies the image and may reveal further fine detail, this is not the case with digital zoom. The optical zoom operates prior to image capture, therefore increasing the Nyquist limit of the original image. The total number of pixels will not change, but a smaller area of the original scene will be captured by that number of pixels. Digital zoom, however, is applied after image capture. As with all interpolation processes, because they are based on an averaging of existing pixels, the magnified image may appear blurred”

Allen, Elizabeth, and Sophie Triantaphillidou. The Manual of Photography, Taylor & Francis Group, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucreative-ebooks/detail.action?docID=647538.
Created from ucreative-ebooks on 2022-04-30 10:49:57.

After looking at these photos, I returned to the park with my camera I took a series of photos with the camera on auto, another with the camera on aperture priority, and a further set with the camera on aperture priority but with the ISO set to 200. This was a series of experiments to see what the different settings would do at a range of zoom settings. Unfortunately it was a cloudy day.

Auto

Aperture priority

 

Aperture priority at ISO 200

Two things are immediately obvious: the camera zoom has less range than the phone zoom, and the images are much less blurry. These two things are probably related, and also the camera produces better quality photos. I had expected some bokeh when using aperture priority, as with the next exercise, but perhaps because the close and central ground is essentially negative space this didn’t happen. 

A further difference is that the phone zoom acts like a magnifying glass, whereas the camera zoom produces a somewhat flattened image in which more of the foreground remains at higher focal lengths than it does in the phone photos. 

For my final image I layered three photos, with the zoom increasing with each layer. In this way, I used the zoomed images, which appear to have less depth of field, to create an illusion whereby the path appears to be elongated and the composite image seems to have more depth of field than does the base photo alone.