Tag Archives: zoom

zoom lens

Posted on June 3, 2014 | 4 comments

Aina and I spent two weeks zooming around France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, and Sweden.

No we didn’t. Zoom is not the right word at all.

Yes, it’s true, we did take a few very fast trains (the French TGV and Belgian Thalys both go over 300 km/h), and a few at least reasonably fast trains (120 km/h). But other than that, we mostly walked, averaging over 10 km each day.

And, more importantly, I did not use a zoom lens.

This really matters. I actually brought four lenses, but on the first day of the trip I put on my 20mm f/1.7 lens (equivalent to 40mm on a 35mm camera) and ended up leaving it on for the entire trip, no exceptions. It’s a nice, sharp, fast lens with minimal distortion. It’s a moderate wide angle and covers scenery quite well and, with any camera of good resolution (such as mine), can be cropped down for a tighter angle of view (you lose resolution, but are you planning to make a poster of it? If not, it likely makes no perceptible difference). With that lens on my Olympus E-PL3, the whole camera fit neatly into my jacket pocket when it had to, and it still took good pictures.

Meanwhile, everywhere I went, there were many tourists walking around with huge cameras, camera bodies the size of plates with zoom lenses on them that weighed a few kilograms each and could actually have been used to club a horse to death. Not that they were, of course. They were just used to club photos and a whole vacation to death.

Look, a camera that big and heavy is a pain to carry around. And a zoom lens is like any other all-in-one-type thing – fax/copier/printer combos, all-season radials, whatever: it does a wide variety of things not very well. It is guaranteed to be slower, harder to use, less versatile in the ways that really count (e.g., varying depth of field), more prone to distortion, less sharp. It guarantees that people will waste time zooming in and out and in and out trying to get just the perfect angle. It also guarantees that you’ll miss some shots just because you left the frickin’ heavy ugly thing in your hotel room for a switch.

Some people go for these lenses because they think they look professional. The truth is that when you do see a pro with a zoom it’s because they actually do need to shoot dramatically different focal lengths and they just don’t have the money to have multiple camera bodies with different prime lenses on them (prime = single focal length). Mainly, though, people have them because the camera body comes with them (a kind of basic all-in-one deal), or because some salesperson upsold them to one (they tend to cost more). Sure, they look impressive. In the same way as sesquipedalian words look and sound impressive but may impede communication.

The word zoom does not start with lenses, of course, and is not limited to them. But I’m finding that the word zoom probably means you’re being pandered to. Examples? Zoom lens, of course, for reasons I’ve just given: people think it looks impressive, but photographically it’s typically your worst choice. There’s also digital zoom, which is actually just cropping plus interpolation so you get a bunch of junk pixels – extra file size but no gain in image quality. But there’s also Zoomer, a magazine and marketing concept marketed to baby boomers who are becoming – not seniors, gracious no! – “zoomers.” And there’s zoom zoom, the marketing concept for Mazda. No worse than any other marketing concept, and in fact better than many, but marketing butters its bread by pandering, and zoom zoom is, like all car ads, selling you not a machine but a self-image.

The word zoom comes from onomatopoeia: it first of all described a buzzing sound. Airplane pilots borrowed the word to describe abruptly climbing with an airplane, no doubt at least in part because of the noise the engine made. The word has come to refer to fast motion in general, especially motion of short perceived duration (something may be moving fast for a long time, and we might not think of that in terms of zooming, but if you’re standing still it will zoom past you). The sound lends itself to a feel of such a motion; say it out loud and you may get something resembling the Doppler-effect sound of a very fast motor vehicle going by, the engine buzz coming and the tire hum fading away as the pitch lowers. And a zoom lens, when you’re looking through it as it zooms in or out, seems to be producing rapid limited-duration rapid forward or backwards movement: zooming in and zooming out. Suitable.

Which brings us to the fact that zoom lenses do have their uses. On movie cameras, they can produce a valuable effect, zooming in on someone to tighten the focus. (On news TV cameras, on the other hand, this effect has often been used to close in on someone who is experiencing a strongly emotional moment, a practice I have long viewed as one of the most utterly detestable things. They’re upset. Stop intruding on them for a moment, will you?) And for some varying real-life circumstances, a zoom lens makes equipment much simpler – you make trade-offs in terms of speed and weight (and cost!) for that specific versatility.

That’s really the thing about zooming. It zooms in on one thing: versatility in focal length. You lose some versatility in aperture (and thus range of shutter speed too) and portability of equipment, and you lose some sharpness too. You may even lose some skill as a photographer. Relying on zooming in and out for composition is like relying on punctuation to do your writing. Working with one lens with one focal length focuses your mind. It zooms out from the one thing and can help you think about all the other things more. It also makes you move your lazy butt a bit more.

Let’s take a parallel example in the world of words. Some people zoom in too much on the etymology of a word without paying attention to current usage and phonaesthetics. Just remember this: if we zoom in on etymology, a zoom lens is a lentil making a buzzing sound. Yes – lens is Latin for ‘lentil’; the piece of glass got the name due to shape resemblance.

Oh, are you curious how my single-lens adventure worked out? I took 1160 photos, and you can see the 230 I liked best on my flickr, www.flickr.com/photos/sesquiotic/. I cropped almost none of them, because I composed for what I saw and because, honestly, how much time do I have? Yes, many of them could use a bit of trimming and adjustment. I make no great claims as to their artistic merit, but I guarantee you they’re better than I could have gotten using a zoom lens. I do have a zoom lens – it came with the camera body. It stayed in the bag the whole trip.

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zoom

Posted on September 5, 2013 | 3 comments

A colleague today mentioned that her copyediting professor had said the Mazda “Zoom Zoom” slogan was incorrect because zoom implies upward motion, as with a plane or rocket.

Siiiiiggggghhhhhh.

I am not happy that someone who is teaching editing would insist on a false restriction such as this. Why do people zoom in on one specialized sense and take it as the whole picture?

Here is why that instructor thought this was a real restriction: in aircraft slang, as of 1917, to quote the Daily Mail (from the OED), “‘Zoom’..describes the action of an aeroplane which, while flying level, is hauled up abruptly and made to climb for a few moments at a dangerously sharp angle.”

So the instructor is right? No, of course not, for two reasons.

First, that is a specialized sense and not the original – the original sense, dating to 1892 at the latest, is, per OED, “To make a continuous low-pitched humming or buzzing sound; to travel or move (as if) with a ‘zooming’ sound; to move at speed, to hurry. Also loosely, to go hastily.”

And second, what matters is not how the word was used in 1917 or 1892; what matters is how the word has come to be used and generally accepted in the most recent decades. Usage determines meaning, and current usage – like much non-specialist usage for the past century – allows zoom to refer to speed more generally, as in the original definition, and certainly to automotive speed.

But oh, oh, oh, some people just have to, have to, have to come up with restrictions on language. They don’t want to see the big picture. In the field of meanings they look and discover an “original” sense or see some “technical” meaning, zoom in on that, and decide that that must be the true sense and all the others are wrong. The etymological fallacy runs rampant. Conversational trump cards. Learn a new rule, feel more superior – or anyway learn a new rule and have new mental furniture to structure your existence. (Many, perhaps most, people actually love rules and restrictions, even if they don’t always adhere to them. As Laurie Anderson sings, “Freedom is a scary thing. Not many people really want it.”)

But isn’t the specialized sense the more accurate sense? They’re specialists, after all!

No, that doesn’t make it more accurate. That makes it more of an exception. Look, in medical speech, indicated means ‘considered the appropriate treatment’ – as in “selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors are indicated in clinical depression,” which means “drugs such as Prozac are considered appropriate treatment for depression.” But in everyday speech, that’s not what we mean by indicated, and you’re not required to be talking of berrytherapy if you say “He indicated the berries on the table.” So with technical terms generally. This includes biological classifications. The botanical class called berries includes bananas, but in ordinary life bananas are not berries.

I’m put in mind of a guy I knew in university who said that Calgary wasn’t a city because it didn’t have a cathedral. He based that on the idea that in medieval times a city was a city if it had a cathedral. He was, of course, wrong for several reasons: Calgary has a cathedral; we are not in medieval times; the medieval definition of a city that he was calling forth was not the original definition nor in any way a reliable definition, and it certainly is not the current definition. In short, he needed to zoom out. And get with the times and the facts, too.

And then there’s the fellow – a former English teacher, yet – who disputed the semiotic use of the word icon to refer to something that signified by resemblance. An icon, he declared, is an Orthodox religious image, and any other use is an abuse! Ah, dear, dear, dear. The word icon comes from Greek for ‘image’, so if you want to talk about commandeering a word for a specialized sense, it would be the Orthodox usage that does so…

Zoom is a perfectly usable (even if currently somewhat commandeered by Mazda) word in relation to speed, especially engine-driven speed, and it has a nice taste to it. We can ask ourselves why “zoom” specifically. There are similar sound words, too, like va-va-voom and the vroom vroom of an engine. The sound a piston engine makes (and, more particularly, made a century ago) seems best matched with a voiced fricative to start with, but the depth of the roar can call forth the high mid-back vowel [u], and the sustain and echo of it can be represented by [m]. Compare zip – much quicker and less substantial. Compare it with other sounds such as “shing” – that would be a sword being unsheathed, not an engine, no? Perhaps “brrrr”? No, that could be an engine, but one that’s just holding steady. You really do get a sense of something moving rapidly past and into the distance with “zoom.” Even the movement of your mouth, with the tongue moving from front to back while the lips purse and then close, reinforces this.

Oh, and why do we “zoom in” and “zoom out”? There’s that rapid motion again. When camera lenses capable of quickly and smoothly changing focal length came in, the effect of the focal length shift from the viewer’s perspective was experienced – as it still is – as being like rapid motion towards or away from the subject. As zooming towards or away from the subject – into or out of the frame. So there’s another one for the rapid motion sense. Oh, and that’s a technical sense, too. It’s also been around for more than 60 years. So there. Now zoom out again.

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Posted in editing, language and linguistics, word tasting notes

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