Visual Perspective in Photography

Camera to subject distance is the determining factor.



These two sets of photographs show that subject to camera distance, not lens focal length, determines visual perspective in a photograph. The subject of the first set is the head and shoulders portrait. Geometrical architecture is the subject of the second.
An 8-foot subject-to-camera distance usually provides the most complimentary look for the subject in head and shoulders portraits; too close and the nose seems too big, to far and the head looks fat. I honestly can't tell much difference in these examples. I may re-do the set using someone else as the subject. Framing and focusing is a little tedious in self-portraits.


18 Feet

8 Feet

2.5 Feet

50MM LENS at 18 Feet
Full Frame

50MM LENS at 18 Feet
Cropped and Enlarged

150MM LENS at 18 Feet
(Zoom Telephoto)

50MM LENS at 8 Feet
Full Frame

50MM LENS at 8 Feet
Cropped and Enlarged

80MM LENS at 8 Feet
(Zoom Telephoto)

50MM LENS at 2.5 Feet
Full Frame

50MM LENS at 2.5 Feet
Reduced in size.
-
-

28MM LENS at 2.5 Feet
-

ARCHITECTUAL PHOTOS
Distant, Medium, and Close Views


Distant

Medium

Close

Distant with 55mm Lens
Full Frame

Distant with 55mm Lens
Cropped

Distant with 200mm Lens
(Zoom Telephoto)

Medium with 55mm Lens
Full Frame

Medium with 55mm Lens
Cropped

Medium with 80mm Lens
(Zoom Telephoto)

Close with 55mm Lens
Full Frame

Close with 55mm Lens
Reduced to match

Close with 28mm Lens
Full Frame




This is how I think visual perspective works. I've never taken art or perspective drawing so this just describes what I think we see in photographs.

In these two sketches I've imagined an angle for the FOV of some wide-angle lens. It is used here to photograph a near object, such as the entrance to a columned walk, and a far object, such as a door at the end of the walk.

When the lens (camera) is near the entrance of the walk, the entrance takes up the entire field of view and the far door takes up a much smaller angle. The result is that the image produced by the entrance has a large area, shown in red here, and a small area for the far door, indicated here by the blue.

With the camera and the same lens much further away, the entrance takes up much less of the field of view (the red lines in the lower sketch). However, the angle to the far door, although smaller than the angle from the near location, is much closer in size to the angle at the entrance to the walkway. So the far door looks much larger (blue) relative to the entrance (red) although it is a much smaller area of the total image. Of course, the entrance is a much smaller area of the total field of view as well.

If a telephoto lens is used instead of the wide-angled lens, the same angles still exist for the entrance and the far door. The only difference is that the FOV angle would be less. A zoom lens with the right zoom range could be adjusted so that its field of view would equal the angle of the walkway entrance from that same "far" distance. Just imagine the wide angle illustrating the FOV in the sketch getting smaller and smaller until it becomes congruent with the angle to the entrance. Those other angles won't change in the process of "zooming" and they will still have the same relative "size" as shown in the sketch.



Scene photographed using a 28mm lens. Cropped to form a panoramic view.


Here is the same scene from the same distance using a 55mm lens on the same SLR 35mm film camera. Two photos were taken and scanned and the digital images were digitally stitched to make one panoramic image almost identical to the one made with the 28mm lens. A little vertical distortion is evident in the 28mm image and, of course, the 'stitch' line is visible between the 55mm images. A little more care in matching the light intensity of the images would have made the stitch less obvious.


Skipper Family Magazine
SITE INDEX
BACK



3/30/03