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

There is a flattening effect of focal length, but it comes from changing your preferred working distance rather than an optical effect. If you take a picture of someone at 10 feet with a 20mm and an 85mm then crop in the 20mm picture it will look the same. However, if you fill the frame with a persons face with a 20mm and then with an 85mm by foot zoom you’ll get different pictures due to the change in the ratio of distance to the lens.

If you have something 1 Unit wide and it’s 1 Unit away from you, then you move it so it’s 2 units away from you then it goes from taking up 60 degrees of your field for view to 28.96 degrees. However, if it starts at 10 units away then moving it one more unit goes from 5.7 degrees to 5.2 degrees. So yes, it is just cropping, and not distortion but it still changes the look of the photo by changing the effect of distance on relitive size in the final image in a lot of typical uses.

You can see the same thing in huge murals of people: from a distance they look like normal propotions, but when you get close and at an angle they start to look really weird because the relative distance between parts of the painting is different than how we’re used to seeing people.