There is a large variety of lenses available for most hand-held cameras on the market today. These lenses are used for different photographic applications. The types of lenses you may use in the fleet are as follows: wide angle, ultra-wide angle, rectilinear, macro, normal focal length, telephoto, and variable focal-length, or zoom, lenses.

Wide-Angle Lenses

Anything less than 40mm in focal length (for a 35mm camera) is considered a wide-angle lens. Again, we are speaking of the lens focal length as it applies to 35 mm cameras.

A wide-angle (short focal length) lens is designed to take in a large view and is indispensable when working in confined spaces or when you want to cover a large area. Wide-angle lenses have their own qualities, causing apparent, repeat, apparent, distortion and foreshortening of perspective, so objects close to the lens appear large, while background objects diminish in size dramatically.

Many photographers choose a 28mm lens for their 35mm camera wide-angle lens. This is partly because this focal length allows the typical wide-angle effects without introducing apparently distorted images, such as bent walls. As well as providing a wider field of view, wide-angle lenses also produce great depth of field at all apertures.

Short-focal-length lenses do not, as is often believed, actually change perspective. The close view-points allowed by wide-angle lenses can cause perspective effects that appear distorted but are perfectly natural ways of seeing objects at close range.

A wide-angle lens magnifies features nearest the camera To fill the frame when photographing people with a wide-angle lens, you must move in close. This causes a distorted view. But wide-angle lenses can be used when special effects are desired, such as deliberate distortion, when exaggeration of features or when surrounding areas add to the viewer's understanding of the subject.

A lens hood, or lens shade, is an important accessory for any lens. It is especially important with a wide-angle lens. Strong light can easily cause flare when reflected internally between the elements of the lens, and unless you take proper precautions by using a lens hood, your pictures may be spoiled. Sometimes you are able to see flare or ghosting in the viewfinder, but more often than not, it is not visible to the human eye, and it only shows up on the processed film.

Another precaution to take with wide-angle lenses concerns filters and other accessories attached to the

Table 1-4.-Choosing Lenses to Match Angle of View

front of the lens. When you use more than one filter or a particularly thick filter, you may end up with vignetting. This results in the edges of the image being cut off, particularly at wide apertures. When using wide-angle lenses, you should use lens hoods and filters designed for the particular lens in question.