I just got a new camera and I’ve been reading up on some basic photography terms. I leaned out that F Stop is the aperature and the shutter speed is how fast the shutter clicks and that they both work together.
I also know that focal length is the distance of the lens from the film (or sensor). But what is all this about 35mm and 17mm and 50mm lenses?
Is that the diameter of the lens? Is one better than another?
Those are the focal lengths of the individual lenses. If you want to find out more than you wanted to know about photography go to www.fredmiranda.com and look over the boards. I hope the link got underlined properly. From there you can go to more places than TWA used to take you.
Funny. I used to care a great deal about f stops and shutter speed and ASA and all that.
Now I never think about it at all. Clearly I am a carefree digital snapshooter and not an artiste.
But, once you get a digital camera with real f-stops and shutter speeds you can control, you will MARVEL at the stuff you take. I’ve got a long term lease (I have it, he doesn’t) with my son’s Canon digital rebel and it made realize what a lot of fun it is to take photos. And mess with photoshop.
an artiste redux
It’s not necessarily the physical diameter of the lens - the physical diameter will be printed on the end of your lens with a little diameter symbol (a circle with a line through it) and that’s the number you’ll need to use if you want to buy a filter or something.
The other mm measurement is the focal length. This determines how much of a scene you will get into your photo. (I did some measurements with my zoom lens ages ago and determined that a camera set at about 54mm will have the same field of vision as my eye.) A lower number (such as 35mm) means you can get wider panoramas into your shot. A really low number (such as 17mm) will distort the image into something called a “fisheye” which is fun to play with but not hugely practical. A higher number (such as 80mm) means you get close-ups - the higher the number (I had one that was 500mm once), the closer the image appears, but there’s often a tradeoff in terms of amount of light required to get a good shot.
I prefer zoom lenses so that I can vary my focal length, but there’s also a tradeoff there - generally (at least when I was studying it in the 90s) a zoom lens will not give as crisp an image as a static lens, due to the internal optical workings necessary to create the zoom function.
Up to a point what Beth is saying there is correct, except the focal length and it’s designation as a wide-angle or telephoto is directly related to the image area it needs to cover, so while a 17mm is a (quite) wide angle on a 35mm film camera, it will act comparable to a lens 1.5 the focal length on a digital SLR which has a a sensor smaller than the 24x36mm of the film camera. On a small digital camera the sensor will be even smaller and the 17 mm lens will act as a very moderate wide angle lens.
A pretty standard focal length will be around 28mm on a point and shoot digital, 35 on a digital SLR, 50 on a 35mm film camera, 75 on a 6x6 film camera and 135 on a 4x5 large format. All’s relative and not to be confused.
Thanks everybody.
Peter, that would explain why my old point and shoot made everything seem smaller. The pictures always captured a lot of stuff on the sides that I didn’t see through the view finder.
I’ll have to check my manual to see what focal lengths I can get with mine.
It’s one thing to know what all these things are in theory, it’s another to apply them.
It’s not a super professional camera but it does allow me to manually adjust all the settings.
View finder information is another matter, not all viewfinders cover the exact area that will appear in your image. Printshops may use masks that crop the image on your negative a bit as well, hard to know sometimes where you are at.