My experience with the DA 16-45 suggests that the distortion of a good
zoom is comparable to that of a prime. I had very little previous
experience with zooms in thirty years of photography, but I'm beginning
to appreciate them for certain situations. To me, the question of
whether to zoom or move in or out depends on the perspective I want to
achieve. If I'm doing a walkaround and hoping for an undistorted people
pic, I'll usually go right to 45mm and position myself for the framing
I want. If I'm sitting in a restauratnt and merely want to capture more
of a room, I'll go wider as necessary. Shooting up at a skyscraper, I
might want to achieve wide angle perspective, so I'd position myself
accordingly. In other words, zooms should be used, the same way primes
are used. Decide what you want to shoot, pick the right focal length
for the job, and choose your camera position. The order of those
choices may vary for different subjects and circumstances.
Paul
On Mar 24, 2005, at 7:13 AM, Shel Belinkoff wrote:
OK, with all the discussion about zooms here these past months, I got
to
thinking about how such a lens is used.
It seems that if you are standing at a certain spot and want to fill
the
frame with the subject, you'd use the zoom feature to do so. But, is
the
perspective the same as if you used a shorter focal length prime lens
and
moved closer to the subject, assuming that in both cases the subject
fills
the frame to the same degree.
Zooms (from my limited experience) seem to have more distortion at the
wider and longer ends of their focal range compared to primes of a
similar
focal length. Is that a generally fair statement?
Shel
