Shooting with a 35mm lens vs 50mm

Ansel said:
Is it me or is it a lot harder to shoot with wider angled lenses?
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not really harder, just a different view of thinking and composing.

I as well tend to shoot with one lens and camera at a time but focal length can be anything from 21mm-135mm
Oddly enough when I'm on vacation/travelling my go to focal length is 28mm or 35mm but when shooting for work I go for the 50mm.
 
Brian Atherton said:
A 35mm on my Leica has been one and only lens for over a decade. Earlier this year I bought a 50mm (Elmar-M), which I’m enjoying a lot. Looking through the viewfinder compared to a 35mm lens the 50mm frame looks to me like a tele – principally, I guess, due to the surrounding viewfinder outside of the 50mm frame. On a SLR a ‘normal’ 50mm looks, well, just normal.
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everything is relative
 
daveleo said:
50-55mm was labeled the "normal" focal length because if you look at an object through the viewfinder then look with your eyes only, the object will be the same size (not smaller or larger when viewed through the viewfinder).
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Until you use a viewfinder with a different magnification…
 
^beat me to it. If you had a 35mm lens and a viewfinder with huge magnification, you could have 1:1 with the 35.
 
tunalegs said:
The distance corner to corner in an image, is about equal to the distance a viewer views that image from - dead on. Not diagonally. When that perspective matches up to the angle of view, that relationship is "normal" (for what it's worth).
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I'm not sure what you're saying, or what the conflict is with what I said. You need to specify which corners you're talking about, and why viewing distance (of the print?) makes any difference.
 
daveleo said:
50-55mm was labeled the "normal" focal length because if you look at an object through the viewfinder then look with your eyes only, the object will be the same size (not smaller or larger when viewed through the viewfinder).

My eyes see the same as a 55mm lens, in that regard. Nonetheless I favor the 35mm angle of view for making pictures.

I still hope that Fujifilm will make an X-mount 35/50 (equiv) click-stop lens (let's say f2.0-2.8) for let's say $600US. In silver. My guess it could be half the length of their 18-55 zoom. And if I did the math right, the largest aperture diameter would only be 12 - 13mm, so it should not be a very fat lens either.
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At what enlargement and what viewing distance? And what's your viewfinder magnification?

Cheers,

R.
 
Well, I made my "normal" comments based on a 40 year stream of Minoltas and Nikons, a few Canons and my recent Fuji X-E1 (set at 55mm), and I just re-did a sanity check upstairs again, and that's what I see.

You guys want to change the magnification from those examples, I guess that's okay, then that paints us into the corner that "actually nothing is 'normal' because I can always change something - like viewfinder magnification - to change the results" (which I think a wise person noted a few postings above).
 
daveleo said:
Well, I made my "normal" comments based on a 40 year stream of Minoltas and Nikons, a few Canons and my recent Fuji X-E1 (set at 55mm), and I just re-did a sanity check upstairs again, and that's what I see.

You guys want to change the magnification from those examples, I guess that's okay, then that paints us into the corner that "actually nothing is 'normal' because I can always change something - like viewfinder magnification - to change the results" (which I think a wise person noted a few postings above).
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That's only if we define a "Normal" lens as one that gives 1:1 magnification through the VF - as you have done.

If we define it as Wikipedia has, we need to know the viewing distance, and the final image diagonal as well as the image diagonal on the negative to define "normal." But we don't need to know the magnification of the VF.

If we use a definition based on image circle, as I have done, we avoid even needing to know the shape of the final image, viewing distance etc.

All these definitions based on similarity to what the eye sees ignore the important fact that the eye itself is a useless bit of optical engineering but the software reconstruction is amazing.

My personal view is that 43mm is correct, but that in real life a fudge factor applies. 35mm is as close to 43mm as 50-55mm is. To me, this is the range of normal lenses for the 35mm format. Anything wider than 35mm is a "wide" lens. Anything longer than 55mm is a "long" lens - and I know that leaves some very short "long" lenses, but that middling-long focal length range (56 to 90-ish) is short on clear terminology IMO.

Perhaps the cutoff could be expressed in fractions of "normal" - Wide is 1/2 N to 4/5 N, Normal is 4/5N to 6/5 N, Long is 2N+ etc.

On the original question - yes, the wider the harder, based on the "get closer" principle. But some shots are better in WA, and I use the 21mm quite a bit (Super wide = <1/2 N?). Based on Wikipedia definitions, this should mean holding the paper pretty close to the eye, but human vision goes wider again than 90 degrees of arc.
 
That image circle=diagonal makes sense. But still, why base it on something outside the frame that you never see? I don't really think it's all that important really, it was just something that occurred to me.
 
Ranchu said:
That image circle=diagonal makes sense. But still, why base it on something outside the frame that you never see? I don't really think it's all that important really, it was just something that occurred to me.
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And for between format comparisons, the final cropped image size is useful. E.g. if you know you are going to print 8x10m "landscape", it's the comparative size of the cropped portion of the image that is important, not the bits hanging out the side (for 35mm) or top and bottom (square format). This gives slightly different comparison focal lengths between formats to the ones commonly used (as described in Wikipedia).

Whatever the best definition is, camera manufacturers from the early 20th century (at least) used FL=image diagonal for the lenses used on fixed-lens still cameras. The Leica is possibly the first significant exception, and that was almost certainly due to the availability of a nearly suitable cinema lens already in inventory.
 
Ranchu said:
I'm not sure what you're saying, or what the conflict is with what I said. You need to specify which corners you're talking about, and why viewing distance (of the print?) makes any difference.
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I'm still trying to understand why you think people have to look at an image diagonally for it to be normal. :confused:

But to put "normal" into vague terms. Think of it this way: When you go to a movie you sit further from the screen than you sit from your computer screen. And the distance which is optimal for viewing both screens is roughly the same distance as there is from corner to corner of the image being viewed.

If you viewed the movie screen from the same distance as you view your computer screen you would not be able to see the whole image, because your natural, human, angle of view is not wide enough to see all of a screen that large from such a short distance. And if you were to sit as far away from your computer screen as you do from a movie screen, you would be seeing a lot of other things within your field of view besides just the computer.

What a "normal" lens does in theory is approximate the human angle of view for a given distance, so that the perspective in the printed image looks "natural" or "normal" to the viewer when they look at the image from an appropriate distance, ie. when viewed from a distance approximating the diagonal of that image.
 
tunalegs said:
I'm still trying to understand why you think people have to look at an image diagonally for it to be normal. :confused:

But to put "normal" into vague terms. Think of it this way: When you go to a movie you sit further from the screen than you sit from your computer screen. And the distance which is optimal for viewing both screens is roughly the same distance as there is from corner to corner of the image being viewed.

If you viewed the movie screen from the same distance as you view your computer screen you would not be able to see the whole image, because your natural, human, angle of view is not wide enough to see all of a screen that large from such a short distance. And if you were to sit as far away from your computer screen as you do from a movie screen, you would be seeing a lot of other things within your field of view besides just the computer.

What a "normal" lens does in theory is approximate the human angle of view for a given distance, so that the perspective in the printed image looks "natural" or "normal" to the viewer when they look at the image from an appropriate distance, ie. when viewed from a distance approximating the diagonal of that image.
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That's kinda what Wikipedia says. I don't know why you would think that looking at something the distance of the diagonal would be normal ... insert smilie here.

Really, the term "normal lens" has nothing to do with what is "normal" when it comes to viewing. It's just a term. And for 100 years or so, that term has been used for lenses that are close approximations of the longest dimension on the film - the diagonal.

It does happen that if you sit/stand/view at the same relative position as the lens node you will have the same perspective that the camera did. But this is true of all focal lengths.

http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/cameras-vs-human-eye.htm does a good job of explaining the differences - and it agrees with me about a 35mm "normal" being 43mm (Whew - otherwise I would have had to refer to some crappy site just to avoid that disagreement - not).
 
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