Photography

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A place to politely discuss the tools, technique and culture of photography.

This is not a good place to simply share cool photos/videos or promote your own work and projects, but rather a place to discuss photography as an art and post things that would be of interest to other photographers.

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Let's Discuss Focal Lengths Beyond 150mm (alien.top)

submitted 11 months ago by billingsley@alien.top to c/photography@viewfinder.pro

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At what point does longer focal length no longer matter? I want to take photos of things far away, like across the street.

I would do a camera test if I still owned my 70-300 Canon kit lens but I don't. Right now the longest focal length I own is a 24-70 for my Sony.

I remember about that lens, once I got out past 150-175m, it seemed like the FOV was just cropping in more rather than actually feeling closer to the subject. But that was a cheapo kit lens that had a terrible reputation. Does that just apply to cheap lenses or do more expensive lenses have more magnification?

Is there really a significant difference between 300, 400 and 600m lenses? Of course I have no physical access to any such lenses at the moment.

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[–] JayEll1969@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago

If you set up your tripod and took a photo of a subject with a 600, 300, 150 and 75mm lens all from the same place, then cropped the 300, 150 and 75mm images to the same as the 600 then the main difference would be the resolution, as you have to crop away more and more of the image.

If, however, at each step you moved the tripod forward half the distance then the subject would stay the same size but because the camera is getting closer each time the perspective to the background would be changing and the FOV would appear totally different because of that.

The longer focal length means that you can fill the frame with the subject from further away without having to crop into it as much.

You'll hit a point where you sill start getting worse results - not necessarily because of the lens but because of the atmospheric conditions. Heat haze caused by he sun heating up the ground will give a mirage like image and start to blur objects further away - tyhis all depends on location and conditions.