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In
photography
Photography is the art, application, and practice of creating durable images by recording light, either electronically by means of an image sensor, or chemically by means of a light-sensitive material such as photographic film. It is employed ...
, a rectilinear lens is a
photographic lens
A camera lens (also known as photographic lens or photographic objective) is an optical lens or assembly of lenses used in conjunction with a camera body and mechanism to make images of objects either on photographic film or on other media capab ...
that yields images where straight features, such as the edges of walls of buildings, appear with straight lines, as opposed to being curved. In other words, it is a lens with little or no barrel or pincushion
distortion
In signal processing, distortion is the alteration of the original shape (or other characteristic) of a signal. In communications and electronics it means the alteration of the waveform of an information-bearing signal, such as an audio signal ...
. At particularly wide angles, however, the rectilinear perspective will cause objects to appear increasingly stretched and enlarged as they near the edge of the frame. These types of lenses are often used to create
forced perspective
Forced perspective is a technique that employs optical illusion to make an object appear farther away, closer, larger or smaller than it actually is. It manipulates human visual perception through the use of scaled objects and the correlation ...
effects.
The most famous example is the
Rapid Rectilinear Lens developed by
John Henry Dallmeyer John Henry Dallmeyer (6 September 183030 December 1883), Anglo-German optician, was born at Loxten, Westphalia, the son of a landowner.
On leaving school at the age of sixteen he was apprenticed to an Osnabrück optician, and in 1851 he came to L ...
in 1866. It allowed distortionless photos to be taken quickly for the first time, and was a standard lens design for 60 years.
As of 2020, the Laowa 9mm f/5.6 lens is the world's widest rectilinear lens for full frame cameras.
The vast majority of video and still cameras use lenses that produce nearly rectilinear images. A popular alternative type of lens is a
fisheye lens
A fisheye lens is an ultra wide-angle lens that produces strong visual distortion intended to create a wide panoramic or hemispherical image. Fisheye lenses achieve extremely wide angles of view, well beyond any rectilinear lens. Instead of pr ...
which produces a distinctly curvilinear,
wide-angled result.
See also
*
Rectilinear grid
A regular grid is a tessellation of ''n''-dimensional Euclidean space by congruent parallelotopes (e.g. bricks).
Its opposite is irregular grid.
Grids of this type appear on graph paper and may be used in finite element analysis, finite vol ...
*
Rectilinear projection
Rectilinear means related to a straight line; it may refer to:
* Rectilinear grid, a tessellation of the Euclidean plane
* Rectilinear lens, a photographic lens
* Rectilinear locomotion, a form of animal locomotion
* Rectilinear polygon, a polygo ...
*
Nikkor 13mm f/5.6
*
Pinhole camera model
The pinhole camera model describes the mathematical relationship between the coordinates of a point in three-dimensional space and its projection onto the image plane of an ''ideal'' pinhole camera, where the camera aperture is described as a poi ...
References
*
Photographic lenses
External links
The physics of Rectilinear and Equidistant wide angle lenses{{Photo-stub