Moving The Camera: Nowhere are the wonders of modern optics demonstrated more graphically than in the application of optics to photography. Images can be recorded without distortion, although distortion is sometimes purposely utilized to compensate for other discrepancies.
The Camera can be locked onto an apparently moving the Camera image in order to record the image as a fixed point, or the Camera can extend its field of vision by panning around its own axis and reducing a 360° sweep to a straight, flat plane.
The electronic flash has a further capability: it can emit flashes intermittently. Harold E. Edgerton of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who invented the gas-filled tube in 1938, first made use of it to examine rapidly moving the Camera machine parts by the long-familiar strob-oscopic method: a light flashing at exactly the rate that a regularly moving the Camera object revolves or oscillates will illuminate the same phase of the motion at each flash, and the object-to the eye and Camera alike-will appear to stand still.
Containing the New Optical Laws of the Camera Obscura or Daguerreotype, demonstrated that converging perpendiculars of the Camera image were indeed mathematically correct and concluded: "Art has always represented objects geometrically, or as they cannot be seen in the perpendicular and visually, or as they can be seen in the horizontal direction."3 But his findings were ignored. Indeed, amateurs were warned in manuals and instruction books never to tip the camera. Many hand cameras were even equipped with levels to assure the viewer that he was holding the Camera horizontally.
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Photography
