Shooting Movies Without Shooting Yourself in the Foot

CHAPTER 29 Lenses

Let's start with prisms. We all know that Isaac Newton took a prism and used it to separate white light into bands of light of different colors (what we call a spectrum). And so had thousands of time-wasting fellows in the centuries since someone first picked up a piece of burned sand out of the campfire. But old Isaac did something unusual. He took a second prism and recombined the rainbow back into white light. And then he did something unprecedented: Instead of saying, “Oh, how pretty!,” he contemplated, he observed, and he wrote about it.

So we owe lots of what we know about light to Newton. We know that light is composed of different wavelengths that can be spread and compressed. This characteristic allows us to make lenses ...