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A few caveats to this. One, the recommended 50mm focal length lens here is specific to full-frame cameras with 35mm sensors. If you have an APS-C camera, whic

A few caveats to this. One, the recommended 50mm focal length lens here is specific to full-frame cameras with 35mm sensors. If you have an APS-C camera, which is quite common, then you want a ~32mm lens, and if you use M4/3 like I do, then you want a 25mm lens, to achieve this same effect. Of course it's a lot simpler to abstract away the camera sensor size and simply look at field of view, which for a 50mm full-frame lens is about 40 degrees. This is actually not that much; it's quite "zoomed-in" in appearance compared to everything you can see at once through your eyes, which is at least 90 degrees field of view plus more for your peripheral vision. So the following quote from the article is definitely inaccurate: > The 50mm lens is called a “normal” or “standard” lens because the way it renders perspective closely matches that of the human eye. To really match the experience of being there, you need an ultrawide lens to capture the full human field of view. The 40 degree field of view of a nifty fifty is like looking through a narrow doggy cone of shame.

SpaceInvader 4y ago
> If you have an APS-C camera, which is quite common, then you want a ~32mm lens, and if you use M4/3 like I do, then you want a 25mm lens, to achieve this same effect. It's not the same effect, far from it. It's different focal length, that will render different image.
- wilsonjholmes 4y ago
  Would you mind explaining or offering resources on understanding why it is different? I have a M43 camera as well, and I have always just halved the focal length and aperature I want a lens to be on my system to be a roughly equivalent match to the full frame performance I am trying to emulate.
  - SpaceInvader 4y ago
    I'll try :) Generally speaking focal length is a characteristics of a lens which does not change, if you use smaller sensor you're just "cropping" what given focal length would render. For example if you'd have, let's say 100mpix camera and 24mm lens it would give you different perspective than 85mm evn if you would crop 24mm image to have same angle of view as 85mm.
- avalys 4y ago
  A 50 mm lens on a full-frame sensor will render an equivalent perspective to a 32 mm lens on an APS-C sensor. You can easily verify this by taking an 24-70 zoom lens on a full-frame sensor, taking one image at 50 mm in full-frame mode and another image at 32 mm in APS-C mode. Depth of field and other optical properties may be different but the perspective will be the same. The only thing that changes the rendering perspective is the physical location of the camera. If the camera does not move and you take a picture with the same field of view, the perspective will be identical regardless of the sensor size and focal length you used to achieve this. The reason different focal lengths are imagined to produce different perspectives is because, implicitly, you need to stand a different distance from the subject to frame the same image at different focal lengths, and it's this difference in camera position that causes the change in perspective.
  - SpaceInvader 4y ago
    Actually perspective WILL BE different, angle of view is changing, not what the lens is rendering.
avalys 4y ago
> To really match the experience of being there, you need an ultrawide lens to capture the full human field of view. The 40 degree field of view of a nifty fifty is like looking through a narrow doggy cone of shame. This entirely depends on the size and perspective from which your photos are viewed. If you're taking photos that will be printed in 8 foot posters to be hung on a wall and viewed standing right in front of them - yes, a wide-angle lens with 90-degree or higher FOV will resemble the perspective you see through your eye. However, most people view photographs at smaller scale - on their computer screen, their phone, (long ago) in index-card-sized prints, or in medium-sized prints they hang on their wall in a frame and view from some distance. If you're looking at a photo on your phone - that kind of is a narrow doggy cone of shame, and a photo taken with a 50 mm lens and displayed on your phone will still resemble the same perspective you'd see viewing that scene with your eye.
- CydeWeys 4y ago
  Most of my photo viewing is done on a 34" desktop monitor from a couple feet away, so yeah, I'm not actually experiencing the doggy cone of shame effect. My widest lens is 12mm (M4/3), and I find it's often insufficient for capturing the entire view that I would like (in street/building-scape situations), so I'll switch to the 0.6X ultrawide lens on my Pixel 5, which has a 107° field of view. At that point you can capture the entirety of, say, a building, just from the opposite corner of the intersection.

SpaceInvader 4y ago

> If you have an APS-C camera, which is quite common, then you want a ~32mm lens, and if you use M4/3 like I do, then you want a 25mm lens, to achieve this same effect. It's not the same effect, far from it. It's different focal length, that will render different image.

wilsonjholmes 4y ago
Would you mind explaining or offering resources on understanding why it is different? I have a M43 camera as well, and I have always just halved the focal length and aperature I want a lens to be on my system to be a roughly equivalent match to the full frame performance I am trying to emulate.
- SpaceInvader 4y ago
  I'll try :) Generally speaking focal length is a characteristics of a lens which does not change, if you use smaller sensor you're just "cropping" what given focal length would render. For example if you'd have, let's say 100mpix camera and 24mm lens it would give you different perspective than 85mm evn if you would crop 24mm image to have same angle of view as 85mm.
avalys 4y ago
A 50 mm lens on a full-frame sensor will render an equivalent perspective to a 32 mm lens on an APS-C sensor. You can easily verify this by taking an 24-70 zoom lens on a full-frame sensor, taking one image at 50 mm in full-frame mode and another image at 32 mm in APS-C mode. Depth of field and other optical properties may be different but the perspective will be the same. The only thing that changes the rendering perspective is the physical location of the camera. If the camera does not move and you take a picture with the same field of view, the perspective will be identical regardless of the sensor size and focal length you used to achieve this. The reason different focal lengths are imagined to produce different perspectives is because, implicitly, you need to stand a different distance from the subject to frame the same image at different focal lengths, and it's this difference in camera position that causes the change in perspective.
- SpaceInvader 4y ago
  Actually perspective WILL BE different, angle of view is changing, not what the lens is rendering.

avalys 4y ago

> To really match the experience of being there, you need an ultrawide lens to capture the full human field of view. The 40 degree field of view of a nifty fifty is like looking through a narrow doggy cone of shame. This entirely depends on the size and perspective from which your photos are viewed. If you're taking photos that will be printed in 8 foot posters to be hung on a wall and viewed standing right in front of them - yes, a wide-angle lens with 90-degree or higher FOV will resemble the perspective you see through your eye. However, most people view photographs at smaller scale - on their computer screen, their phone, (long ago) in index-card-sized prints, or in medium-sized prints they hang on their wall in a frame and view from some distance. If you're looking at a photo on your phone - that kind of is a narrow doggy cone of shame, and a photo taken with a 50 mm lens and displayed on your phone will still resemble the same perspective you'd see viewing that scene with your eye.

CydeWeys 4y ago
Most of my photo viewing is done on a 34" desktop monitor from a couple feet away, so yeah, I'm not actually experiencing the doggy cone of shame effect. My widest lens is 12mm (M4/3), and I find it's often insufficient for capturing the entire view that I would like (in street/building-scape situations), so I'll switch to the 0.6X ultrawide lens on my Pixel 5, which has a 107° field of view. At that point you can capture the entirety of, say, a building, just from the opposite corner of the intersection.