The Girl and the Trees
The computer chip inside camera lenses is a rectangle of picture elements that acts like a bucket brigade with juice instead of water. Each pixel zaps its neighbor and the zap is different if the pixel was excited by light. A wire at the end takes the zaps one at a time and eventually gets the big picture. This passing of zaps from one pixel to another is why the chip is called a CCD: charge-coupled device.
Lenses turn the light of the world into a cone with a sharp point that's focused on the CCD. Because CCDs are so small, the point is VERY sharp. If you took a picture of a girl in front of some distant trees, both the girl and the trees would be in sharp focus.
Some photographers hate this. Great depth of field seems like a good idea but when everything's in focus, nothing stands out. This is part of why we hate the Video Look. If the trees were blurry, the girl would stand out more.
Thankfully, CCDs are bigger now so alryssa stands out against the trees in picture 6 of this slide show.
Lenses turn the light of the world into a cone with a sharp point that's focused on the CCD. Because CCDs are so small, the point is VERY sharp. If you took a picture of a girl in front of some distant trees, both the girl and the trees would be in sharp focus.
Some photographers hate this. Great depth of field seems like a good idea but when everything's in focus, nothing stands out. This is part of why we hate the Video Look. If the trees were blurry, the girl would stand out more.
Thankfully, CCDs are bigger now so alryssa stands out against the trees in picture 6 of this slide show.