Excercise: Focal Lengths
For this exercise I was using the 5D and 24-105 and 100-300 lenses though didn’t get quite to explore the full telephoto range as I had to get out of the way for a lifeboat launch!
First off a scene shot at 24mm
Sunset over the river Arun in Littlehampton with a traditional fishing boat pulled out onto the mud flats to be worked on. Hard to see in a shot this wide angle but there are a couple of interesting looking buildings on the far bank that we will zoom in on over the course of the exercise.
Next lets zoom in a bit, more or less a standard lens view at 58mm:
The interesting buildings are starting to show in the pictures now, a white house pretty much dead centre and something else a little to the left of that.
Next is the last one with the standard zoom, 105mm:
Ahh, now it becoming apparent the other interesting ‘building’ is looking like it is really a boat on tributary we can’t see from here.
Time to swap to the 100-300 and see what else we can see. Lets zoom in to around 140mm:
Yes that is a boat, so lets zoom in on that to see what we can see.
160mm to see what difference a little zoom makes
While I was lining this up the chaps on the traditional fishing boat dropped its boom hence the disappearance of the rather distracting ropes that appear in the previous frames, while they are a nice feature of the wide angle shot once the context of what they are is lost to the tighter view they become an annoyance. Here is as far as I got before the doors on the lifeboat station behind me opened and I had to get out of the way but one last shot at 300mm taken from a little further along harbour wall confirms what we have already seen about the detail in the centre remaining in proportion and simply being magnified by the zoom.
Cropped a little as I’d got the lens hood cross threaded and it had intruded onto the frame, note to self, if the shot is important spend a few seconds checking for howlers on the camera display even if the kids are yelling for fish and chips!
See and Imagine 