I’ve seen a ton of photos around the web that were taken with a wide angle lens and then imported into photoshop to undergo what appeared to be a guessing game of indication. People would draw rectangles to represent the field of view for different lenses. Obviously decreasing in size as the focal length grew longer and longer. I always thought this was an odd way of representing focal length in a given scene. I decided to try it myself but instead of drawing the lines in photoshop I wanted to use the actual photo taken with each respective focal length to represent it on the chart, or in my case, a slide show. While in the process, I did discover that some of the similar charts I found around the web were pretty accurate but lacked small details such as distortion and depth of field characteristics. Then again, neither of these are particularly important. Depth of field is not important in such a chart since it is a mathematically determined value, and the distortion is an optical characteristic determined by a specific lens design. Despite my aversions to the illustrated focal length chart, I made one myself…
To show a clearer representation of the focal lengths I put together a quick slideshow. And yeah, I added music to a 26 second slideshow. Cause I’m awesome like that. Click below to view the slideshow.