Sarah,
Look for >Click here to view the tv ad. on the left below the text
adjacent to the photo and click on that sentence.
Good luck,
Glyn Judson, 1969 Caravel #508, Santa Monica, CA
> 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