Camera Basics 3: Focal Length

You have to see the scene, before you take the picture but the camera will see it differently!

Take a look at these two photos:


The candid portraits of the man from Austin is markedly different from the Toronto street scene. Forget the black and white conversion: The two photos were taken at very different focal lengths. I had to use the maximum tele setting on my lens to (secretly) take the Texan's photo but in the street scene, I used the widest setting to pack everyone insider the shot. As a matter of fact, even if I had walked up closer to the Texan, to capture his face in the same proportions, it would probably look more like Reza in this one: .

People find photos taken at smaller focal lengths (wide) more captivating. They are certainly different from what your eyes see: curved looking straight lines, that large nose, the "nearby" horizon. No wonder that, almost all those enchanting landscape shots are taken at wide focal lengths.

Similarly, large focal lengths (tele/long) make a flat photo. The sense of distance is lost and things start looking a little like renaissance paintings. Exactly because of this, they would work best for realistic (and better than realistic) portraits. Next time you happen to go to a beach where fashion photographers are shooting scantly clad models with perfect bodies, pay attention, if you can (male point of view), to the big telescopic lenses they use to photograph their subjects from a long distance.

A little attention to the focal length, combined with a little bit of walking closer or farther can sometimes be all that differentiates a photo that you want to keep looking at and a photo that you later get rid of.

Finally as a rule of thumb, a 50mm lens on a 35mm camera is roughly equivalent to what your eyes see in terms of distortion of distances. On film or full frame digital cameras, the 50mm lens also gives you the same field of view. For smaller frames, you have to go wider as the area in which the photo is captured is smaller. A little practice and comparison can give you a better idea. If you feel adventurous about getting really realistic with the focal length and distance to the subject, try to make one of these.