The biggest award is that your images will look differently from nearly everything that is posted today, especially if you get close.
The past decades have been decades of wide angle. Before the turn of the millennium wide angle photography was confined to mostly landscape, architecture and real estate. Often out of necessity and not because people liked the look.
It was in the early 90s that skater subculture chose wide angle out of necessity, but they also embraced the distorted look. From there it went into hiphop culture and became mainstream.
At the same time technological development also facilitated wide angle lenses because together with tiny sensors they can be easily fitted into mobile phones and action cams.
If people 100 years from now will look at our photos and watch our videos the wide angle look will be the dead giveaway of our era.
Many, many famous photojournalists and artists embraced wide angle decades before skater culture did.
A significant number of the most famous photos from the mid century were taken on 35mm or wider lenses.
A big thing to consider is that good and practical extreme wide angle lenses didn’t exist until the 80s and 90s. Something like a 16mm f2.8 lens went from not existing to being in every pro photographers arsenal in the 1990s and 2000s
35mm photos might have been “wide” historically but it’s not very wide. Even the main camera on iPhones are around 28mm.
Skate videos created an explosion of very wide content at ~10-14mm.
> Many, many famous photojournalists and artists embraced wide angle decades before skater culture did.
Photography threads are interesting because they arrive with so many different interpretations of history. There are multiple comments claiming that “everyone” did one thing until a certain famous photographer or specific subculture came along and disrupted the world.
Yet like you said, the only real driver was the affordability and availability of equipment. When it became attained, people started using it.
That is true. A lot of journalism and street photography is 35 mm and that was considered wide by then. The difference is that distortions were seen as an error back then. Wider angles were, as you said, not widely available but I think also not much desired. This changed in the 90s when some embraced the distorted look and made it part of our photographic vocabulary.
Can’t overlook the influence of phone photography, which is usually wider (~26mm equivalent) than what was considered standard in the 90s (~35mm). These days even a 50mm will make your pictures stand out.
Particularly if it this kind of of 50mm
https://findingrange.com/2022/01/14/7artisans-photoelectric-...
I had a long streak where I packed a DSLR with a 50mm everywhere I went and never took any pictures with it because I felt depressed. Switching to zoom lenses (particularly developing a protocol to get a distinct style of landscape protocols out of my kit lens) and getting into sports photography got me out of my funk, also that 7Artisan 50mm is so much more fun than any of the other 50's in my collection. Part of it is the challenge of manual focus, the other part is the extreme wide aperture which can take dreamy looking photos that are entirely different from what people have seen before.
The problem with this is that without AF, you are very restricted to shooting still objects with the aperture wide open.
I too fell for the dreamy look but as i've gotten older the further away from reality a picture is, the more my gut rejects it. At this point Ive seen so many high quality (either at shooting time or post processed) pictures of SF that going around the city actually visiting those places and seeing them with your eyes feels like a massive letdown
The image circle of this is APS-C sized => 1.5x crop factor => 75mm "full frame" equivalent.
I'd categorize this as more of a portrait lens (than "normal" as the 50mm moniker implies).
Another good rule of thumb to remember is that a 50mm lens on a 35mm sensor ("full-frame") is roughly the equivalent FOV of the human eye, i.e., what you see naturally.
I never understood that argument. By pure FOV the human eye is much wider. Of course it is not that simple, spacial resolution drops off to sides (while temporal resolution increases). This makes statements like "50 mm on 35 mm is FOV of human eye" not very meaningful.
if you take a 35mm SLR with a 50mm lens and rotate it vertically (portrait) and hold the viewfinder up to one of your eyes, and leave the other eye open, your binocular vision will merge the two images with no problem/distortion, as if you were not holding a set of lenses up to one eye.
since what you see through the viewvinder is what the taken picture will look like, it is neutral like/wrt your eyes, at the zero middle between wide angle and telephoto. (it's worth considering "who says eyes are neutral?" it's the system we are used to and our brain develops to understand)
it's non obvious to a casual observer that the mm units chosen for the image size (the image gets focused on a 35mm rectangle (you need to know the aspect ratio)) and mm for the focal length are measuring different things, but that's why you just need to "know" that 35mm and 50mm "equal neutral". there are more things measured in mm as well, like the actual width of the primary lens which indicates how much light is gathered to be focused onto the same square.
i'm not a photographer. i don't quite know the mm lingo for what happens when the image sensor/film is wider then 35mm, the large/full formats. the focal lengths "work" the same, but a larger image would need to be focused and that seems like it would require some larger distances within the lens system.
The large format ones get a higher FOV in degrees. IIRC if you keep absolute aperture the same and change focal length to keep FOV the same, the DOF won't perceptually change.
Now, when you realize that there are geometric limitations to how wide an aperture can be relative to the focal length without having to stray from vaguely traditional _shapes_ of the objectives ("camera lens"), you can see that at the expense of fancier abberation corrections and of course larger/heavier glass lenses making up the larger objective, one could use a proportionally wider aperture with large format cameras.
For example, the infamous Barry Lyndon objectives were actually "just" 0.7x teleconverted spinoffs from an originally 70mm f/1 design. https://web.archive.org/web/20090309005033/http://ogiroux.bl...
The phenomenon you describe is a function of viewfinder magnification. It so happens that many SLRs had their magnification such that it worked well at 50mm to shoot with both eyes open. There are SLRs that have different magnification so this trick doesn’t always work.
You can get a rangefinder style camera with a viewfinder that lets you shoot with both eyes open but has a 35mm POV.
People have a variety of theories as to why 50mm is considered the standard lens and why people say it mimics human vision. I have heard so many explanations that I am inclined to say that there’s not really much but opinion behind it. It might just be that it was the most common first lens and because it is cheap and relatively simple to make a good, fast 50mm lens.
if that trick doesn't work, then either 1. your viewfinder is not showing what you will shoot which is what everybody expects because otherwise how can you frame your shot, 2. you are not using a 50mm lens or 3. you are not using a 35mm SLR
the point of a "single lens reflex" system is that you can see what the picture will look like by looking through the same (single) optics
No. As I stated, if the trick doesn’t work at 50mm it is because you are using a viewfinder with a different magnification.
A Pentax MX for example shows .97x magnification at 50mm. It will work great for your trick. Meanwhile a Canon AE-1 has .83x magnification at 50mm meaning one eye will be seeing an image where everything is 17% different in size. It will be like one eye is looking at a 55 inch TV and the other eye is looking at a 45 inch TV. Or more accurately, one eye is looking at the same TV but from 17% farther away.
If you throw a 58mm lens on that Canon, the trick will work again because you are zooming in to compensate for the zooming out that is happening in the viewfinder.
Of course, none of this has anything to do with 50mm lenses being “standard”.
Don’t believe me? Go slap a 50mm lens on an SLR with very low magnification. Or read one of the dozens of articles and threads out there explaining your misconception. Here’s a great one: https://www.lomography.com/magazine/319909-cameras-in-depth-...
technically speaking, if your viewfinder has a different magnification, that is (to coin a word) Multiple Lens Reflex; you have added a lens. SLRs were invented to show you "what the camera sees" so you can tweak it perfectly on different dimensions.
you are describing a different system that does not show you what the camera sees. I'm not saying what you are talking about doesn't exist, I'm saying that your over-inclusivity takes away the value of describing what I described and is telling people "there's really nothing you can say, a million different things could be going on"
The way I understand is that it is not FOV but zoom level. If you look through a camera with 50mm lens, the subject and background should appear same size as when viewed with naked eyes. Doesn’t matter if it is full frame or crop sensor.
Relative size of subject and background is cause by distance to them, not focal length.
Also called ‘perspective’ and the only way to change it is to move the position of the camera
It does not matter if you crop an image taken with a 50mm lens to get the same area of the motive as taken with a 300mm lens from the same ‘standpoint’ - there will be no difference between foreground and background (except for grain and noise - but that’s another story… ;-)
You have to move the camera to change that.
This is often seen in movies (those shot on real film) as opposed to on video as zoom lenses are often used without moving the camera, film based often use a dolly to move the camera. The effect of combining zoom and camera movement to keep the same crop of the foreground while having a dramatic effect of the background quickly getting larger/closer (or vice versa) is really effective - also in illustrating this concept.
In my early life (before taking the education as a photographer) I was really liking wide angles as it brought ‘life’ in to a lot of pictures. Wide as in 24 mm for my 35mm camera (Nikon F2, from 1973 should you wonder) was a favorite, replacing my 28 mm.
Too bad full frame digital is still so expensive. Using a 14-24 f/4 on the DX format in (Nikon D7100) just is’nt the same.
So now the iPhone is the most used camera (you know - the camera you have with you…!)
If you have 50mm lens, try it. It will look exactly same as if you are looking through a tube with a naked eye.
Both, actually.
It’s entirely independent of focal length.
It has to do with the ratio of the subject-camera distance to the background-camera distance.
As others have pointed out you prove this to yourself in one of two ways:
1. Frame with telephoto, then shoot with a wide angle lens and digitally zoom in photo.
2. Frame with wide angle and then shoot a panorama with the telephone and stich.
2 is significantly harder if you are close to the subject.
Well, no. This article has some clarifications: https://petapixel.com/is-lens-compression-fact-or-fiction/
This is a million times easier to demonstrate with images than text. Wikipedia has a good animation: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perspective_distortion
This page doesn’t have any images but covers the concept quite well: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_lens
The concept of matching a picture to normal human vision goes back to the age of paintings, before any photography even existed.
Love that you mentioned the skateboarding history of it. I have fond memories of our young crew finally acquiring a “death lens” for our VX1000. It was such a fun challenge to see how close you could get because it looked so sick.
Of course that meant we ended up with a bunch of scratches over the years on the lens, and I had my fair share of hitting the lens :)