Focal Lengths and field of view
For this bit I was using the EOS 5D MkII and 24-105mm f4 lens.
First the wide angle view.
Interesting one in that there are so many verticals and none of them parallel something is always going to look to be look to be on a lean! Printed to A4 this had to be pretty much on the end of my nose to match the real view in size
Next the telephoto shot at 105mm
I’m afraid my arms aren’t long enough to say how far away this needed to be to match reality in size, arms length was getting close but not far enough.
Finally the ‘standard’ view where the scene though the viewfinder looked the same size as the one through my other eye.
As expected from the course this one needed to be at about normal reading distance to look the same size as the real scene.
This is where it gets interesting though, from what I read in the course and given the 5D has a full frame sensor I expected the standard to be somewhere around 50mm but in fact it is around 70mm (73m according to Exif data on this photo)
>Problem solved and of course the answer is in the instruction manual! The 5DMkII viewfinder magnifies the view by 0.71, do the maths and through a 1x magnification viewfinder a scene at 51.8mm would look the same size as one at 73mm through my camera. Well I'd say that is close enough to the theoretical 50, the magnification is handy for fitting all the frame into the finder but makes a bit of a nonsense of his exercise!