From the course: Advanced Photography: Medium-Format Digital Cameras
Join today to access over 22,600 courses taught by industry experts or purchase this course individually.
Focal length and aspect ratio
From the course: Advanced Photography: Medium-Format Digital Cameras
Focal length and aspect ratio
- A camera lens focuses light onto the focal plane in your camera, or an image sensor, or a piece of film is housed. So, the camera lens gathers light through it's front opening, and there are a complex series of groups of lenses. It focuses that light to project an image circle at the back of the lens. Your image sensor crops a rectangular image out of that circle. Obviously a bigger sensor crops a bigger chunk of the circle. The focal length of the lens determines how wide a field of view the lens captures, and we refer to a lens that captures roughly the same field of view of the human eye as a normal lens. Because different size sensors crop different size rectangles, what focal length counts as normal, varies from sensor size to sensor size. For example, on cameras with a sensor that's the same size as a piece of 35 millimeter film, a 50 millimeter lens is considered normal. That is, it has the same field of view as the human eye. Focal lengths longer than 50 millimeter are…
Download courses and learn on the go
Watch courses on your mobile device without an internet connection. Download courses using your iOS or Android LinkedIn Learning app.