Postby Mick Fagan » 24 Dec 2021, 13:59
Very nice Maris. The bleached looking fallen tree leads ones eye straight across the river to the line of light coloured Poplars, which in turn are balanced by the dark foliage of the tree on the opposing bank.
As for modern wide angle and old wide angle, one word springs to mind, colour.
I attended a talk on photographic optics during a Summer of Science Lectures many moons ago at RMIT in Melbourne. RMIT is now a University, but back then it really was the same as its name; Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. The talk was about the advances required of optics with the introduction of colour film used in cinematic operations.
The star of the talk was the introduction of the 24mm lens for Technicolor filming. Back then they used a patented 24mm lens and split the image via a clever prism(s) arrangement with the original being two colour via a dual split, and eventually a three colour system via a triple split of the image. the separate images were all recorded to different B&W films which were then either filtered with a colour filter, or were coloured then ran back onto whichever system of the day was current via another 24mm lens variant to make one image for print film. Which was then used for projection in cinemas around the world. Very, very expensive process.
As an aside, once the 24mm patent ran out, aftermarket lens manufacturers suddenly had a plethora of 24mm lenses for 35mm film cameras for sale at somewhere around 50% of the brand name 24mm lenses that were paying royalties. Brand name manufacturers were Nikon, Canon and so on, aftermarket manufacturers were Tokina, Sigma and so on.
My recollection is somewhat hazy as it was close to 40 years ago when I attended that lecture. The basic premise about wide angle lenses really starting to up their physical size was more or less because of the introduction of colour film, which basically came after coloured B&W film, meaning lens manufacturers literally had to sharpen up their game to an order of magnitude that prior to then was not warranted.
As still photography in general followed cinematography and with the introduction of Kodachrome for stills, colour fidelity required ever more complex glass arrangement and as a result they became physically larger. That is what I understood about the chronology of lens design and how things were shaped. When photography celebrated 150 years of being, we attended the best exhibition of photography my wife and I have ever seen. This was in the Deutsches Museum in Munich, which is possibly in the top three museums in the world.
With the introduction of commercial colour photography, the camera designs changed slightly in order to be able to handle the larger optics required for colour corrected lenses. This was noticeable with the subtle change of the front standard on wooden cameras becoming slightly beefier, something which we wouldn't have noticed unless like at this exhibition it was quite clearly pointed out as a subtle yet major change in photography. We spent around 4 hours straight at that exhibition and still we glossed over it. I might add that the majority of those samples were German and French cameras.