From the course: Photography Foundations: Lenses
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Focal length multipliers
From the course: Photography Foundations: Lenses
Focal length multipliers
For more than 70 years, 35mm film was the dominant photographic medium. Then digital photography came along. 35mm film is still used for some still photography and used a lot for motion picture photography. Like a digital sensor, a piece of 35mm film crops a specific sized rectangular image out of the image circle projected by a lens. After 70 years of using 35mm film people got used to specific focal lengths having specific fields of view. So photographers became accustomed to the idea that a 50mm lens was a normal lens, because when used with 35mm film a 50mm lens has roughly the same field of view as the human eye. Anything longer than 50mm is telephoto. Anything shorter is wide-angle. With 35mm film a 28mm lens is pretty wide. A 16 or 24 millimeter lens is ultra-wide. Conversely, 300mm has a good amount of telephoto power and 600mm puts you in the realm of serious surveillance. Most digital cameras had image sensors that are smaller than a piece of 35mm film. That means they crop…
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