Lenses...Hit me

bism · May 27, 2004

OK, looking for a book title here. I want to know ALL about lenses. The heavy stuff. Different glass types, chromatic aberation, distortion, distortion compensation, lense types (ie rectangular, pherical etc) etc. I am not poetic enough to try to explain these things to other people so I need the assistance of a manual of some sort. For example, my attempts to explain pillow vs pincussion distortion usualy fails due to lack of a common ground with "non" photographers.

I am not affraid of the 900 pagers. I want the bottom line, however rough it may be.

Thanks for any input.

ajmall · May 28, 2004

all large book stores will have countless books on photography. i don't know any names off the top of my head but i doubt it will take you long to find what you are looking for.

amazon.com?

Walt · May 28, 2004

You might try browsing through lens reviews on www.popphoto.com After reading a few you should be able to get a bit of a handle on it.

bism · May 28, 2004

Thanks for the link but I need a book so I can say "Here look at this! " to him and have the book supply the picts and educated descriptions. I was hoping someone had a big dusty lens bible somewhere and could pass the title.

thanks again

Mitica100 · May 28, 2004

bism said:
Thanks for the link but I need a book so I can say "Here look at this! " to him and have the book supply the picts and educated descriptions. I was hoping someone had a big dusty lens bible somewhere and could pass the title.

thanks again

I own two books which deal with this, covering all that is of interest to you.

One is Photo Technology by Marshall LaCour and Irvin T. Lathrop and it's published in 1966 by American Technical Society in Chicago. This one talks about the lenses and describes them to a certain extent.

The other book I have is called Advanced Photography by Michael J. Langford (Senior Tutor in Photography, Royal College of Art, London) and is published in 1980 by Focal Press Inc. of New York. This book covers extensively everything that has to do with lenses and I highly recommend it. I don't know if you can come across of it, I bought it some 10 years ago and read it with a lot of interest, a real eye opener. You might be able to find it at Amazon.com or Half.com. The ISBN of this book in USA is either 0803804504 or 0803803966 and for the UK is 0240512091 or 0240512083.

Good luck.