You look at someone's picture and you want to know what MM it was taken at. It's not always easy but here are some tips.
PHOTO GAMES
On monday the #PhotoGames competition had 5SBD on the line to guess the Focal Length of several images. You still have a few hours to turn in your guesses. Winners will be announced later today.
We know it's really not that easy not even for me and I've taken close to 2 million pictures at almost every MM from 8mm-600mm
But hopefully these examples give you some tips moving forward.
We will likely cycle through this particular game again in the future.
WIN SOME MONEY
I'll link those posts for ease of access you can quickly drop a MM guess in the comment
Could take you 2 minutes and perhaps net you 5sbd
This game ends in a couple hours but if you're seeing this later go check out pics make a guess in your mind and then see if you got it right.
Jarvie's Post
DerekKind's Post
JakeGarn's Post
CaseyGrimley Post
AWeber's Post
INSTRUCTION FROM THE INTERNET
Many articles have been written on the subject but these were the first two good articles I came across:
Improve Photography "Understanding Focal Length in 5 Minutes"
Nikon's post "Understanding Focal Length"
What these posts do that I love is take one scene and run through it with a bunch of different focal lengths. They also try to help beginners understand which lens to use or buy.
KEEP AN EYE ON THESE 4 THINGS IN PARTICULAR
- How wide/narrow the view (obvious one)
- How much compression. Specially background toward foreground.
- Depth of field specially what the bokeh is like in the background.
- Where they were standing in comparison to the subject
14MM
- Obviously a 14MM means it's going to include a ton of the scene
- The big signs you usually get are on the edges.
- Look for a little bit of distortion on the edges there's no 14MM lens that wouldn't have them.
- However note images can be cropped.
- So then pay attention to how close the background looks... aka it won't look close at all compared to some of the other images in the set.
- It always helps to have been to the place and from experience realize how much of the scene you got and then do some comparative math.
- but then see some signs of distortion of the edges... is that building on the right really supposed to be that big compared to the others.
- Then how can he get the ground in front of him and the super tall bridge almost right above
- Look at how far back the mountains look.
- see how big the front of my truck looks compared to the back.
- How much of the road it's getting and the distortion of the edges
24MM
- We have a lot less chace for distortion but still wide scenes and not much compression of background to foreground.
- You'll usually not have many blury backgrounds unless the subject is right up in your face.
- It's a very wide scene and the edges aren't very distorted like the 14mm
- You may see the lines bow a little but editing/profile correction may take that out anyway
- Knowing 24mm is an extremely common MM helps as well.
- But the background is trying to be blurry but you can tell it isn't. And just as a side note this was taken at f/2
- Again same stuff... wide scenes edges seem fine and not a lot of compression of the background as well
35MM
- This focal length is like a dance between wide angle and portrait.
- You can tell I'm close to the scene but i'm still getting a good amount of the scene.
- But you can tell there's some nice depth of field and even a good amount of compression
50MM
- This is where we start to notice some compression... meaning those mountains seem to start looking much closer to the subject.
- Remember the 14mm how far away those same mountains would have looked?
- The blurrier background is also a sign of a more zoomed in lens (more than that going on but MM does effect the depth of field drastically, not just aperture)
- When you get into the higher MM range it can be tricky to guess MM based on depth of field. What you need is to understand how close the subject is to the lens compared to the background in order to make those guesses.
- In this one it does "feel" like I'm much closer... and I was so it's a 50mm compared to say my 135mm
- The big question with this is how much of a scene can you really get into a 50mm image. You'd have to be pretty far back with a 50mm... but that's what I did
- And then you see that there is a decent amount of compression of the building to the couple and the building has a nice gentle bokeh on it and that's perhaps how you differentiate between wide angle or not.
135MM
- The compression really starts to ramp up at these focal lengths.
- Plenty of compression to the second player and the building in the back.
- Great blurry/bokey background
- But then think about what's normal for a photographer... where would he or she be standing... probably in this scene a bit further away if it's a golf tournament
- And then you can guess it's cropped... because it was... maybe it's not longer than you suspect and just cropped in. Bingo!
210MM
- The one thing to add to this is... how big is the sun/moon or other distant object... it's bigger in the scene the more you zoom in (focal length)
460MM
- This is a bit trickier because the moon does look huge even bigger than the moon shot at 600mm
... but it's cropped. - But still you get an idea that it's in the higher range.
- The difference between 400 and 600 are much smaller than even 24mm-35mm
##550MM
- If you happened to have some info like this was the awe inspiring Shoshonee Falls in Idaho then you know I'm certainly taking these from a long distance and would need a good zoom.
- But with a keen eye you can notice a good amount of compression as well... though not as easy as when you have a distant object moving way close to the subject
600MM
- And there you have the other moon shot for comparison and see how large it is with something else in the picture.
- Also the compression between the two subjects.
WHY THIS CAN BE HELPFUL
All images were taken by me in the last couple of months and just random examples with some commentaries on how to guess the Focal Length.
I think what you can do is reverse engineer these ideas of guessing and then start implimenting them into choosing your LENS and MM selection for your own pictures.