I just purchased the Yashica Kyocera Samurai DG and have not yet taken any shots. My object is to take good close up shots of some of our small products. My question is: Is it best (in order to get the sharpest picture) to get the camera close in to the subject being photographed or to stand back and use the zoom lens? Or will the resulting out put be the same? The camera has a good glass lens capable of getting as close in as 3 inches. I will await your learned reply and thank you. Jim Richards hitechmed@qnet.com

-- Jim Richards (hitechmed@qnet.com), October 28, 1999

Answers

If the zoom lens has equal sharpness throughout the zoom range, it won't make any difference in sharpness. You could test this by photographing a newspaper against a wall at different distances. The big difference will be in the perspective you will get by photographing an object at the different distances. The telephoto setting will tend to "compress" the features of a 3 dimensional object while the wide angle (closeup) will accentuate those features. Depending on what you are photographing, one approach may look better or more natural than the other. In portrait photography, for example, the longer telephoto settings give a more "natural" appearance to facial features than a wide angle close-up.

-- Dennis Pereira (dpereira@ultranet.com), October 28, 1999.

Good point about the flattening effect of telephoto. a lot of zooms lose sharpness at extreme telephoto. Most let in less in less light as the zoom increases. The other consideration is lighting, if you're using flash, different affect at distances, possible overexposure or odd shadows at point blank.

-- benoit (foo@bar.com), October 28, 1999.

In close-up, or Macro photography, the real problem is a very small "depth of field". This means that the area of sharpest focus will be very small, front to back, maybe only a couple inches. This is why they use the telephoto setting, just as film camera makers also offer a macro lens of 105mm which gives a larger depth of field, even though the photographer has to move back a little. The wide angel setting may improve this depth but also may distort the shape of the jewelry.

Try a "normal" zoom setting near 50mm to 55mm or half the Tele's zoom range.

-- Jim Martin (jfmartin@nr.infi.net), November 28, 1999.