You're taking a photography class, working with a camera whose zoom lens covers the focal-length range \(38-110 \mathrm{mm}\). Your instructor asks you to compare the sizes of the images of a distant object when photographed at the two zoom extremes. Your answer?

Optical magnification in photography describes how much larger or closer a subject appears in your photograph compared to its actual size at a given distance. It's closely linked to the focal length of the lens, which is measured in millimeters (mm).

A lens with a shorter focal length, like the 38mm in our exercise, offers lower magnification, which means subjects will look smaller and more of the scene will be captured within the photograph. This is ideal for landscapes or when you want to include more context in your shot.

Conversely, a lens with a longer focal length, such as 110mm, magnifies the subject more, making it appear much larger and more detailed in the frame, much like a closer view or a cropped version of reality. This level of magnification is great for isolating subjects, such as in portrait or wildlife photography.

A zoom lens, such as the one discussed in the photography class with a range of 38-110mm, offers photographers the flexibility to change the focal length and thus the magnification without changing their position or swapping lenses.

Zoom lenses allow for a range of compositions, from wide shots to tight close-ups, making them extremely versatile tools in a photographer’s kit. With the turn of a ring or the slide of a switch, the photographer can quickly adjust the lens to frame the shot as they desire, which is invaluable when the subject or scene is in constant change or when the photographer needs to react quickly to capturing moments.

Field of view refers to the scope of the scene captured on the camera’s sensor at a particular focal length. It's essentially how wide an area you can see through your lens. A short focal length lens has a wide field of view, which enables capturing more of the scene in front of the lens.

This is illustrated in our exercise where a focal length of 38mm will capture a wide swath of a landscape, cityscape, or group photo. With a longer focal length, like the 110mm, the field of view becomes narrower, concentrating on a smaller portion of the scene. When referring to the field of view, photographers often talk about 'wide-angle' for broad fields of view and 'telephoto' for narrow, more zoomed-in fields of view.