There are ten focal lengths every photographer should know. These are the lenses that cover the most common needs for taking pictures.
1. Wide Angle – 10mm to 12mm
2. Standard – 28mm to 35mm
3. Normal – 50mm to 85mm
4. Telephoto – 100mm to 135
5. Super Telephoto – 200mm to 300+
6. Macro – 40mm to 60mm
7. Fish-eye – 8mm to 16mm
8. Fisheye with 180 degree field of view (circular images) – 8-10mm and 16-18 mm focal lengths.
Focal length is a camera setting that controls the lens’s field of view, or how wide or narrow your photos will be. Focal length also changes how much of your scene will be in focus. This means you can select a focal length to achieve the look you want before you even press the shutter button. Below are 10 focal lengths every photographer should know:
1) 28mm: The wide-angle lens is considered to be one of the most important tools in a photographer’s arsenal because it allows you to capture larger portions of a scene and exaggerate depth. Some common wide-angle focal lengths are 18mm, 20mm, 24mm, 28mm and 35mm.
2) 50mm: The normal lens is used to describe a lens that mimics what our eyes see, known as normal vision. This means that when you are using a 50mm lens, everything within your photo will appear as if you were standing in front of it and looking at it with your own eyes. This makes it an ideal portrait lens because it creates images that look more natural and show facial features without distortion. Normal lenses are also great for landscape photography because they can help bring distant subjects close while still maintaining the natural colors of the environment around them. Normal lenses range from
There are many factors to consider when choosing a focal length for a shot, but it all begins with your creative intent. If you’re not sure what that is, here’s a brief primer on the 10 most important focal lengths and how they can help you achieve it.
I am going to tell you about 10 focal lengths that every photographer should know. The reason is not just to give you some basic knowledge, but also because knowing focal lengths will help you to learn photography faster and better.
TIP: Save the image in your computer. Print it and use it as a reference guide.
1) Wide angle (0mm-35mm): Very cool for landscape and architecture work. The amount of distortion at the edges of the frame is awesome!
On a 35mm camera, the standard lens is 35mm. We say it’s “35mm” because that’s how wide it is, and because that’s what our parents’ cameras were set at, too. It’s a “normal” lens, neither wide-angle nor telephoto.
Roughly half of the lenses I see photographers using are 50mm to 85mm. They’re good, but they’re the same lens you got with your camera when you bought it. What else do you need?
The five focal lengths below are the ones that can change a photo from pretty good to awesome. The first three are normal lenses, but they’re all very different and they give you huge room to play with composition and depth of field. The last two are extreme: super-wide and super-telephoto. They may not be right for every shot, but when they are right, they’re spectacular.
The most common focal length for a standard lens is 50 mm. This lens is the equivalent of the human eye and is great for many things. If you want to shoot something and capture it exactly as you see it, this is a good place to start.
The next most common focal length would be 35 mm, which is generally what I use. It’s much less wide than the 50 and therefore allows you to really control your subject and environment in a way that can create some really beautiful imagery.
Tilt-shift lenses allow you to do this in a very interesting way by allowing you to focus on just one part of the image and make everything else go out of focus. You can do this manually, but with a tilt-shift lens it’s much easier to create some really cool effects.
You can also use these lenses to create very unique panoramas (also called “spherical” or “360” panoramas). Depending on how far away your subject matter is and what kind of movement you’re creating within the scene, it may be possible to get everything into one frame. This requires a special panoramic head and will take some work in post-production, but it’s worth the effort when done right.
50 mm lenses are
We can use the “rule of thirds” as a starting point. We divide the frame into three horizontal and three vertical lines (as shown on the right) and place our main subject along these lines or at one of the four points where they intersect.
Pictures with the subject placed off-centre are not only more dynamic but also more natural, as we tend to perceive things in our environment as being “centered”.
The rule of thirds is a great way to learn how to compose images, but it should not be followed slavishly. The basic idea behind it is that you should try to create a sense of balance within your image.
Perhaps the most common reason why images lack balance is that they have subjects placed too close to the edges. Placing your subject or horizon too close to an edge draws attention to this part of the frame, which can make it seem unbalanced even if there are other elements in the photograph that are meant to draw attention (such as someone’s face). If your image has a horizon, try moving it away from one of the edges by just a few pixels.
The shot below shows how moving the horizon away from one of the edges creates more space and balance in the image:
Another solution might be to crop
