122 How to Do Everything: Digital Camera
the horizon, for instance, the two scenes are virtually indistinguishable. If you??™re both looking at
a person walking toward the house, though, as the person gets closer and closer, your two views
become increasingly different.
And that is what it is like when you look through the optical viewfinder and the camera uses
the nearby lens to take the photograph. Digital SLRs don??™t have this problem, because the optical
viewfinder actually looks through the lens right up until the moment of exposure.
The problem, as you have probably guessed, manifests itself when you try to take a close-up
with point-and-shoot digital camera. Since your subject is only a few inches away, the difference
in view between the viewfinder and the lens means that you??™re not even looking at what the
lens is about to take a picture of. That??™s why most digital cameras have indicators in the optical
viewfinder. Called close-focus marks, parallax marks, or correction marks, these lines show you
how to line up the photograph when you are shooting a close-up. See Figure 6-2, for instance.
Here, you can see the effect of parallax on a photo. The image on the left represents what I saw
in the viewfinder; the image on the right represents what the lens actually photographed.
Pages:
174
175
176
177
178
179
180
181
182
183
184
185
186
187
188
189
190
191
192
193
194
195
196
197
198