Jo Ann -- I can only view the initial frame photo on the IKEA page, but it looks
like it was shot with a wide-angle (short) lens -- gets in more foreground &
background and makes it look like you are farther from the subject than the
camera actually is. Short lenses are used for a "big sky" effect in outdoor
photography, and they are also used indoors to photograph a small room and get
most of it in (e.g., real estate ads). They stretch things at the edges more
than in the center, and in the foreground more than the background -- hence
that curve of the back end and the exaggerated width of the end combined with
foreshortening of the length of the Airstream. I would guess this is about a
35mm lens, and the photographer is about 10 feet from the subject.
Longer lenses bring the background in closer than it is and collapse distance,
so you can juxtapose things that are actually not very close to each other, if
one is behind the other in relation to the lens. A classic long lens shot is a
lion coming up right behind a zebra at a watering hole, when in fact the lion
may be quite a distance away.
Finally, all cameras with fixed elements have convergence distortion, where
straight edges tend to converge in the distance -- take a photo of a tall
building, for example, and it will look like it narrows toward the top, most
exaggeratedly if you are standing at the base of it looking up. To defeat this
effect and take a picture of what a building actually looks like, photographers
use those cameras that have a pleated bellows, which allow independent movement
of the front and back of the camera, so that the lens can be placed at a
different angle from the back and correct convergence distortion. These cameras
can also be used to correct the distortion of short lenses, so you can take a
close-up of a plate of food and not have the plate look oval, or stretched
toward the camera.
All of these effects are used in photography to do interesting things with
subjects. They're not really tricks, just different properties of the lens,
sometimes desirable and sometimes not.
See, more than you ever wanted to know about photography!
--Sarah
> was a lens trick or what - any photographers
> among us?
> Jo Ann