Digital Camera World - UK (2019-08)

56 DIGITAL CAMERA^ AUGUST 2019 http://www.digitalcameraworld.com

Camera

College

What is perspective all about?

There’s more to using lenses than choosing a focal length that suits the size of the subject.

Where you stand makes a huge difference to the look and feel of your pictures too

Last issue we looked at

lenses and how the choice

of focal length and the size of

the imaging sensor inside the

camera determine the angle

of view – in other words, how

much of a scene or subject can

be captured in a single shot.

The angle of view isn’t

a measure of the physical

distance recorded across

a scene, but rather it’s the

angular distance, which is

expressed in degrees. A wide-

angle lens, as the name makes

plain, has a wide angle of view,

while a lens with a longer focal

length gives a narrower view.

If you’re using a zoom lens, you

can simply zoom the lens in and

out to change the angle of view.

You can also increase or

decrease the amount of a scene

that is recorded in a picture by

physically moving the camera

further from or closer to the

subject. This can have a

dramatic impact on the look

of your pictures – much more

so than standing in the same

place and zooming a lens.

If you take two photos of the

same subject – one using a

short focal length and one using

a long focal length, but moving

the camera each time so that

the subject remains the same

size in the frame – the resulting

pictures will look strikingly

different; this is a result of

the change in perspective.

When we talk about

perspective in photography,

we’re referring to the spatial

relationship between objects.

Changing the focal length

doesn’t change the

perspective – moving

Marcus

Hawkins

Photographer and

writer Marcus is a

former editor of

Digital Camera

The complete guide to modern photography

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