Project 9

For Project 9 I was running short on time and had to make do with heading into my back garden and taking a few shots there, rather than go down town to find a more interesting subject.

We share a garden with multiple houses and so there is a long uninterrupted view onto a small wooden house provided for the local kids to play in. I found a good position for the tripod and selected two lenses to give me a wide range of focal lengths to play with, a 24-105mm zoom and a 100-400mm zoom, so a 16:1 maximum ratio.  Here are the results at 24mm, 50mm, 100mm, 200mm, 300mm, and 400mm:

Looking carefully at the images the perspective does not shift as the focal length changes.  As the light path for the photons reflected by the subject does not change and the lens is rectilinear, the lens is imaging the same incident light in each case.

From a viewpoint perspective the most attractive image is the 200mm.  Prior to this there is too much negative space in the foreground and the background is very cluttered.  Beyond 200mm the small house is too dominant in the frame.  At 200mm the background is almost completely green hiding the fact that this is an image created in the heart of an apartment complex, we could almost be in the heart of a forest.  The downside is that the exercise has made a bullseye out of the house, a crop to an effective focal length of 250mm would allow some compositional control, such as the following