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Focal Length: Angle of View

The focal length of the lands and really understanding what the different angles of lens do. And I know this seems pretty obvious. Will you just look through the lands and that's what you see? And I think there's a lot more involved than maybe some people give give it credit for and so that's what this section is all about teaching so we have our fifty in the middle, and then as we go less than fifty, we get into our wide angles and I've chosen some specific numbers to kind of work within showcase. There are plenty good numbers in between, I just need to limit it so that we don't have this section take up the entire class. S o we're going to be going in these different increments as we go up the scale, so when we talk about angle of view, what we're talking about is what we see in some direction now there's different ways to measure what you see, you could measure it diagonally, which is kind of the maximum amount that you can see through a camera lens vertically. I prefer to do it hor...

izontally because we typically hold the camera horizontally, and we kind of want to see what we want to know what we're going to see from side to side. And so that's the way we're going to be talking about things now my favorite location so far I found for testing and shooting all the different lenses out there is this road that leads to monument valley and you will see along the top what focal length were at and of course, this class is going to be covering all these focal lengths mainly dedicated towards full frame cameras and I know a lot of you probably more than half of you don't have a full frame camera and so you guys can pay attention to my little cheat notes over here on the right hand side of the screen, which have the crop frame sensor so if you said I like what I'm seeing right here, what lens do I need? If you have full frame, you look up above if you have the crop frame, you look over to the right hand side over in the blue. All right? So this is your fifty millimeter lands and over on the left hand side for the technical geeks who want to know exactly what my scene. So I decide I'm gonna give you the horizontal vertical and diagonal specs on exactly what we're seeing so fifty millimeter lands, this is what it looks like when you stand out in the middle of the road, okay, so what we're gonna do first is we're goingto zoom back toe wide angle thirty five millimeter is very close to normal. It's just a very, very slight wide angle lands going back to twenty four, which is, uh, one of the lenses that you will hear me say over and over again is one of my favorite focal lengths. I think it's a nice intermediate right in the middle of the wide angle arena. We're going to go down to sixteen, which is an ultra wide angle lens. Very few lenses get down here and now we can bring up little framing where we just were so that you can see that twenty four, thirty five, fifty or just simply little crops within the frame. One of things to notice here, sixteen is notice how big the road is in the frame. How much this foreground plays a part of the photo. And this is a very important element that we're going to talk more about us. We talk a little bit about landscape lenses and why they choose wide angle lenses and putting elements in the foreground. Very useful technique. Alright, let's, zoom our way back up to fifty millimeter and as I say, there's different steps along the scale here, but these are the steps that I've chosen, they're good little increments. So we're back up here to normal, and now we're going to dive into the world of telephoto, so we're going into a hundred millimeter lands. And so these tele photos are often used for bringing subject closer, as we say they're not really coming closer. Of course, we're using a narrower angle of view so we can see them larger on frame here. So I think everyone should have some work, something upwards of a two hundred millimeter lands I think it's just really valuable for capturing details in you need two different types of photography, and so if you're wondering how big a lens do I need, most people are gonna want to two hundred some people need more four hundred millimeters great for outdoor. I work very hard to shoot indoors with anything around four hundred because you have everything so faraway, so great telephoto landscape type lands or sports photography lands. And then the biggest lands that nikon makes is an eight hundred millimeter lands and I I'll just show you one here in the classroom because we got one from our friends at glaser's camera, and this is their biggest lands, it's also their most expensive lens that you can buy new this is darn close to twenty thousand dollars, which is always allowed to do that. This has a really strong grip on it. I mean, you could dio curls with this thing, this would be, like the most expensive dumbbells and get two of these, but these are really nice lenses, these air typically used by I think, when you see surfing photographers on shoreline or bird photographers, tiny bird up in the jungle in costa rica, or something just to be the ideal lens for that also consider it the base camp land. So if you're going to go toe everest base camp and you want to photograph climbers up on the mountain, this is the lens that you would want to have it's, a pretty heavy lands and it's, not something that you would want a handhold, because the angle of you is just so narrow, but it is an absolute beautiful piece of machinery, and once we go through our features in technology section, you'll have an even greater appreciation of why this costs eighteen thousand dollars. One of the reasons is that the glass in these types of lenses sometimes let me get this straight. I want to make sure that you know it's on the end there, some of the glass in there takes upwards of eighteen months to go through the process of curing and molding and shaping and grinding and everything else so eighteen months for one piece of glass that's a long time and so that's one of the reasons why it cost so much money all right so that was our most telephoto lens and let's come on back down to the fifty millimeter I think it's just kind of nice to be able to see one location that has all the different lenses in it just to kind of get a feel for what we're seeing through our lenses and so when I'm out looking around at potential photographs in my mind I'm often looking with these little frame lines of what do I want in the frame what's gonna look good because I have to change the world from three dimensions into two dimensions and what's going to appear in that frame what's going toe look good what's my angle of you that I needed so having a good understanding and a good choice of these is kind of the first element and choosing what lens you want because when it comes to recommending the lens I would prefer to ask you right back not what lens do you want but what focal links do you need to solve your problem you got to address that before you can address which lends you should choose so we're going to go through the different angles of you a little bit more carefully looking at specific photos and so the lenses just simply showing us an angle of you fifty's kind of normal, and we're going to go back. We're going to go all the way back to ny cons widest lens, which is a fourteen millimeter lands we're going to go all the way up to eight hundred millimeter lenses. Now, once again, these numbers are for people who have full frame cameras, and if you're not sure of what camera you have, if you're not sure, it's probably not a full frame camera. It's it's kind of like if you ever ask somebody the question, do you own a ferrari? The answer is pretty much never I don't know have really paid attention it's like, if you buy, if you have a ferrari, you know it's a ferrari, if you have a full frame camera, it was probably a big deal when you bought it, and so if you're not sure, but you can take the lens on and off, then it's probably one of the crop frame sensors if you can't take the lens on and off it's probably something even smaller and completely different than this. And so if you said, well, I really like that twenty four millimeter lens that john likes, but I have a crop frame camera what lens do I need? Well, you just kind of follow that down here and you go out I needed sixteen millimeter lens because I have a nikon d fifty five hundred or thirty three hundred or seventy two hundred or something so those are equivalent focal links that see the same angle of you but with the crop frame sensor now before we actually get into the lenses we should just discuss for just a moment how we see the world with our own eyes what focal length do we look at when we're just looking right now what do we see with their own eyes? Well with our eyes we have a lens on the front and our imaging area is our retina which covers a large part of the back of our I know what that means is that we see a huge angle of the view of our light coming into our eyes and so we have this really wide angle lens in fact it's like a five millimeter lands one hundred fifty degrees from side to side but when we want to see something really sharp, we have to look at it very carefully all right? And that uses the phobia in the back of our eye, which is this very tiny area where the rods and cones are very densely packed in her eyes and so when we read a book you can't read a book with it off to the side of you you've gotta look specifically at the words so that you can read them because that's, how our eyes have the greatest sharpness in that very small center area. So in some ways we look at the world with a twenty five hundred millimeter lands and that big lens I was just holding that was on ly in eight hundred. All right, so we look at things very, very tiny in a very, very tiny way in that sense, but we also have an area within her eyes called the central retina, and this is where the I want to say. The pixels have p ay the rods and cones of the eye are densely packed, not quite a densely packed as they are in the phobia, but it's a good general dealing area, and this is kind of what I consider our movie seat assignment. You know, when you go into a movie theater, you probably don't want to go up to the front seat, because then you've gotta scan back and forth. You want to get back just to the right place, where you get a nice, comfortable view, where you could just kind of look straight ahead and you can see everything that's going on in pretty good detail. And so that's kind of the way that we mostly look at this world, the central retinal area. Which is fifty degrees from side to side and very similar to about a thirty eight millimeter lands now of course because this is biology this is going to vary from person to person but that in general for human is is accurate so how does this compare with the cameras that were photographing well thirty eight millimeter lands okay well if you recall this is a forty three millimeter sensor and so some very smart photographer said well maybe it's a number that's equivalent to the diagonal of the lens and so a forty three millimeter lands could be considered standard and this works out very well because then if you have a twenty eight millimeter lens for the crop frame sensor that would be their standard lance and so some large format or really small format cameras you could very easily deduce what is your middle home ground of what is a standard lands now we like order in our life in some ways and so we decided to round this number up to fifty that just seems like a nice round number and so that's kind of become the traditional favorite for the standard lands but thirty five is really close to thirty eight so I don't really have a problem calling a thirty five is a normal lens as well it's a slightly wide angle lens the fifty is a slightly telephoto lens uh kind of depends on your perspective the way you say thanks