From the course: Photo Gear Weekly

Unlock this course with a free trial

Join today to access over 22,600 courses taught by industry experts.

"Normal" focal length

"Normal" focal length

- You may have heard of the concept of a "normal lens", but what exactly is a normal lens? Well, it relates to lens focal length. And the idea is that a normal focal length lens will give the approximate field of view of human vision. And so on a 35 millimeter or a full frame digital SLR, the normal lens focal length will be considered 50 millimeters. But of course, keep in mind that not all sensors are created equally. In some cases, for example, you might be using what we all can refer to as a crop sensor or a sensor that is smaller than a standard full frame sensor, or a frame of 35 millimeter film. And of course there are other sized sensors as well, including medium format sensors. And so the normal focal length lens will depend on the type of sensor, more specifically, the size of the sensor that you're using in your camera. And so with this camera, for example, I have a smaller sensor with a cropping factor of 1.6x, and so this 35 millimeter lens would be closer to a normal…

Contents