week 1- Lauren

1.)

 

 

I took this picture this fall in Dayton, Ohio at a corn maze/petting zoo with my digital camera. There were tons of flowers with such character, yet so simple at the same time. I like this picture because of how crisp the colors are as well as how the background is blurred, it really makes the sunflower stand out to its fullest.

2.) Telephoto Lens

In photography and cinematography, a telephoto lens is a specific type of a long-focus lens in which the physical length of the lens is shorter than the focal length.^[1] This is achieved by incorporating a special lens group known as a telephoto group that extends the light path to create a long-focus lens in a much shorter overall design. The angle of view and other effects of long-focus lenses are the same for telephoto lenses of the same specified focal length. Long-focal-length lenses are often informally referred to as telephoto lenses although this is technically incorrect: a telephoto lens specifically incorporates the telephoto group.^[2]

Telephoto lenses are sometimes broken into the further sub-types of medium telephoto: lenses covering between a 30° and 10° field of view (85mm to 135mm in 35mm film format), and super telephoto: lenses covering between 8° through less than 1° field of view (over 300mm in 35mm film format)

The concept of the telephoto lens, in reflecting form, was first described by Johannes Kepler in his Dioptrice of 1611,^[4] and re-invented by Peter Barlow in 1834.^[5]

Histories of photography usually credit Thomas Rudolphus Dallmeyer with the invention of the photographic telephoto lens in 1891, though it was independently invented by others about the same time; some credit his father John Henry Dallmeyer in 1860.^[6]

In 1883 or 1884 New Zealand photographer Alexander McKay discovered he could create a much more manageable long-focus lens by combining a shorter focal length telescope objective lens with negative lenses and other optical parts from opera glasses to modify the light cone. Some of his photographs are preserved in the holdings of the Turnbull Library in Wellington, and two of these can be unequivocally dated as having been taken during May 1886. One of McKay’s photographs shows the Russian warship Vjestnik anchored in Wellington harbour about two and a half kilometres away, with its rigging lines and gun ports clearly visible. The other, taken from the same point, is of a local hotel, the Shepherds Arms, about 100 metres distant from the camera. The masts of the Vjestnik are visible in the background. McKay's other photographic achievements include photo-micrographs, and a ‘shadow-less technique’ for photographing fossils.^[7]

McKay presented his work to the Wellington Philosophical Society (the precursor of the Royal Society of New Zealand) in 1890.

3.) History of Photojournalism

The photograph has affected the way many cultures throughout the world understand and learn about their world. One of the main fields responsible for this paradigm is photojournalism. Photojournalism is the use of photographs in conjunction with the reporting of news in media such as print newspapers, magazines, television news and internet reporting. The incorporation of photographs into news reports is so ubiquitous that a story without photographs to a contemporary audience feels incomplete, as though they were only getting half the story. Consumers depend upon photojournalists to bring them the images that allow them to feel connected to far-away realities, and to be educated about those realities. Photojournalism distinguishes itself from other forms of professional photography by its adherence to the principles of journalism: timeliness, accuracy, fair representation of the context of events and facts reported, and accountability to the public. While a wedding photographer may be documenting an actual event, his or her responsibility is to the client and the presentation that client would like to see. A journalist, on the other hand, cannot be held to the demands of the photographic subject, but rather he or she must be concerned with producing accurate news for the public.  In addition to accuracy, the photojournalist must be careful not to exclude important parts of the context of the event being photographed. A shot of an individual rioter breaking a store window can look like an isolated act of criminality if the photojournalist does not show it in the context of a larger social event whose significance goes beyond the individual act. The emergence of photojournalism, along with its current trajectory, depends a great deal upon technological developments in the camera. As early as the Crimean War in the mid-19 th century, photographers were using the novel technology of the box camera to record images of British soldiers in the field. However, the widespread use of cameras as a way of reporting news didn’t come until the advent of smaller, more portable cameras which used the enlargeable film negative to record images. The introduction of the 35 mm Leica camera in the 1930’s made it possible for photographers to move with the action, taking shots of events as they are unfolding. Newspapers quickly took advantage of this portability, and publications like Life, Sports Illustrated, and The Daily Mirror staked their reputation on fresh, timely images of matters of interest to their readers. In the first golden age of photojournalism, which lasted from the 1930’s to the 50’s, photographers such as Robert Capa and Alfred Eistenstaedt became household names for the news-consuming public. Capa would later go on to found, along with three other photojournalists, the Magnum agency, which supported photojournalists and negotiated to get them copyright of their images, as opposed to letting copyright revert to the publication. In the late 1970’s, the cultural importance of photojournalism began to be recognized by the art world, and photojournalists were given exhibitions and retrospectives at museums and galleries. Photojournalists like Don McCullin received wide attention in retrospectives across the country. Today, most major museums will devote a showing or more a year to photojournalists and documentary photographers. With the introduction of digital cameras, photojournalism has greatly augmented its capacity for reporting up-to-the-minute news from around the world. Not limited by exposures on a roll of film, digital chips can store up to a thousand images, and are less sensitive to airport x-rays and exposure to light. With a wireless internet connection, a photojournalist can send images from the field to his or her editor within seconds of their initial capture. As a medium, the digital photograph has opened up new venues for gathering news, from small, self-published newsletters, to the online blog. These new venues mean an increased market and an accelerated pace for the transmission of news through photographic images.