There are three types of zoom that you may encounter. I highly recommend two of them and want share a caution about the third. Zoom is the process that gets us closer to our subjects.
The first is human zoom. This is where the photographer uses their feet to get closer to the subject. This works well when the subject is friendly and does not attempt to flee upon detection of a camera. Fleeing is common to teenagers and other wild animals.
The second type of zoom comes in the form of telephoto lenses. These lens allow the photographer to get really close to the subject, sometimes without being detected. Zoom lenses come in a variety of focal lengths. You choose the focal length that works well for what you are doing. For instance, wide angle zoom works well for landscapes; mid-range zooms work well for walk-around photography; and long zoom lenses work well for many things, including portraits and wildlife photography. Each class of zoom lenses have their sweet spots and shortcomings. Sharpness, distortion and price are often trade-offs that must be considered. I use a couple of lenses that that cover a long range of focal lengths, 18 to 200 mm and 28 to 300 mm. The flexibility of these lenses offer a lot of freedom, but some distortion is the penalty that I pay. Fortunately, the software I use has built-in corrections for lenses that I use, and if necessary, I can correct most of the distortion with a mouse click.
The third type of zoom, which I recommend against, is digital zoom. Digital zoom could more appropriately be called digital crop, because that is exactly what happens in the camera. As you adjust the digital zoom on the camera, the camera is actually cropping the image captured by the sensor and throwing away part of the detail. The effect is an image that appears magnified but is actually just a portion of the image's data spread out wider on the viewer screen. To overcome digital zoom shortcomings, I recommend using human zoom to capture the image or use the cropping capabilities, found in your post processing software.
[Back to the Main Site]
