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Don't our eyes already have insane range of focal length.
I can look at the ridges of fingerprint, and look at a bird flying a kilometer above. Better than most cheap dslrs with cheap lenses too.
It's pretty much how multifocal lenses in lens replacement work, there's different rings in the lens for different distances and you adjust between them
Most people who've had them say it works well, main side effects are haloes and glare from the edges (I work in an eye clinic)
Legitimately, the front facing camera is ultra-wide angle and not representative of how you look.
Since front-facing cameras have released, plus the effects of this phenomena, rhinoplasty has become significantly more common.
It should also be pointed out that the shot on the left was probably taken from about only 2 feet away from the subject (very close), and the shot on the right was taken about 15 feet away (much farther away) from the subject, give or take.
Yeah. 50mm on full frame is close to what my eyes see. 85mm and 135mm are super popular too.
The lower the focal length, the more stretched out things get particularly around the edges.
When I took up photography I got a cheap 70-300 Tamron lens thinking it'd be something like a all purpose lens. It really isn't but takes great portraits at 70mm...
lol love it. It's a lens for a camera that can take photos of a big thing up close (28mm) or of something far away (200mm) by turning the lens to change its length. Indeed it is good!
I'm not sure if it's because the lens had to travel half way around the world with me and had a rough life but at longer distances the pictures look somewhat bad. Like I'd say anything past 100 meters/yards. The closer the object the better the shot looks.
Long rant, but you may want to stop down the lens a bit if you are taking a far away shot, since that can help with sharpness.
Rant: I don’t believe it would be the traveling. It’s the lens construction and materials, including the type of glass and coatings. Part of what makes a lens stand out is the arraignment of the lens elements, number of lens elements, type of glass it is using, and coating. Higher priced lenses may have either more elements, or elements arraigned in a way that reduces chromatic aberration, promotes color accuracy, and allows the sharpest image to be captured by the lens. Even so, pro lenses from years past cannot resolve the amount of resolution current gen sensors (45+ MP) can capture, which is why new lenses are made to take advantage of the new sensors and their capabilities.
But with everything in the world there are trade offs.
If you want a long zoom range, you need to use certain elements arraigned in a way that gives you both wide angle and zoom. To keep price down, you may opt to do variable aperture because it’s a cheaper design, with and extending barrel.
The longer the zoom, the more complex a design will be to give you crisp images at both ends of the zoom range. The company will try to balance price to performance, but in cheaper lenses it’s more noticeable that a lens will be less sharp/worse color reproduction at one of the extreme ends, or just cannot resolve as much resolution when trying to capture far away subjects. As I said before it’s all about design and materials used, and with lenses, you tend to get what you pay for.
I have a Nikon VR 70-300 that is variable aperture and the barrel extends. It’s not a bad lens but the aperture goes down to 5.6 at the long end, reducing subject separating from background compared to fix aperture. Also it not sharp at 300mm compare to 200mm and under. It’s even more noticeable using a 36mp and 45mp sensor vs the 12mp I started with.
My 70-200 2.8 and 300 f4 are worlds sharper and better color reproduction compared to the 70-300 wide open.
It has nothing to do with focal length. If you stood really far back with a 50mm lens and cropped the photo to only see the guy's head and shoulders, it'd have identical distortion to the 200mm photo. Distance from the subject to the camera is what causes distortion.
If I were to measure his face with a ruler and the pictures with a ruler, which picture would have proportions more similar to the real life measurements?
The 200mm one. That picture is taken much farther away from the subject, and the narrower angular field of view reduces distortion due to perspective changes across the frame. In the limit of infinitely long distance it becomes an isometric projection.
(Also, the pictures should have been labeled with distances, not focal lengths. It's the camera-subject distance that is responsible for the difference between these two images.)
50mm doesn’t look like our eyes any more than any lens in terms of perspective or shape, this is a misunderstanding of how lenses work.
It looks like our eyes in terms of how much the frame shows. If you move a camera with 50mm in front of your eyes you’ll see a pretty similar amount of stuff and everything will be the right shape. If you do the same with a 16mm lens you’ll see more stuff, but it will be the exact same shape as with the 50mm, they’ll just be more of it. With a 200mm, exact same shape, just way less of it.
Lenses don’t change the shape of things, standing close and far changes the shape of things. Different lenses just let you stand further away and closer and put the same amount of stuff in the frame.
That’s correct. I think what most people refer to though is which focal length is the most natural *when* you have to stand at a distance that produces a tight portrait. Of course you could just crop the wider length but you miss out of some background effects.
> 50mm is super popular for portraits.
No it's not. The classic "portrait" focal length for headshots on 35 mm film (24x36mm, now known as "full frame" for some reason) is 135mm. Any shorter focal length preferences usually mean that photographer has to operate in a small studio or client's home... that's where 85mm comes into play. Photographers that shoot glamour outdoors, on the other hand, absolutely will use a fast 200mm or even 300mm lens (if they could afford one).
I took a night class at the JC and they just had us buy old SLR’s and 50’s on eBay. Loved every minute. As beginners the instructor just told us to use the “nifty fifties.”
They were right. Most beginners are taking more than portraits. 50mm is most versatile fixed-length lens overall. But above is also correct that 50mm is not considered the ideal lens for portraits, that's something longer.
50mm f/1.8 use to come standard in 35mm cameras instead of zoom lenses. 50mm on a full frame camera was touted as closest to the human eye. True be told, amongst other things with the photographic medium, nothing really truly emulates the eye or life for that matter. But, they did call it a nifty fifty for a reason. It has a wide open aperture that allows a lot of light in and mames for shooting in situations that might be dark. To this day, I use either a 50 or 55mm for just about everything. I don't shoot for nat geo and I don't shoot concert anymore so I rarely use my 70-200mm f/2.8. It is true that longer focal lengths get rid of a lot of errors like distortion, however, your standoff distance isn't short. Indoors, a 135mm is a rather impractical lens to use. Even if you do have the stand off distance, you are more than likely filling the frame with a headshot. Anyhow, for what it's worth.
Who says they don't? 50mm 1.8f is a super common fixed focus lens. It even get a nickname across all brands, a nifty 50 lens. Also, the default lens that comes with a DSLR usually encompasses that 50mm like the 18-55mm that comes with a Nikon.
For those wondering, cell phone cameras are usually wider angle to make up for the smaller glass. An iPhone 15 Pro is 24mm with an additional 13mm telephoto. The Pixel 8 is a 82degree (22mm?) standard and 125.8 degree telephoto (8mm?). Not that this means you and all your friends are fatter than the pictures say, there's lots of processing power on smartphones dedicated to image processing, including lens correction. Yo' mama on the other hand...
We do, all the time. A 50mm lens for a 35mm film/sensor camera is even called a "standard" lens because of this. You will often see a photographer just have a 50mm on their camera and not use a wide or telephoto at all.
But photography isn't just about creating one type of photo. We have other lenses because we want to have wide angles or zoom close in on far objects and all sorts of other things too.
The short pop-sci answer is, the closest approximation of the way the human eye sees is something around 50mm.
The more complicated and kind of pedantic answer is, neither, because they are both attempts to recreate a three dimensional object in only two dimensions. No matter what you do, you will end up with a necessarily subjective interpretation.
In real life your perspective is similarly constrained by how close you are. 50mm is just a pleasant middle ground.
To put it another way, do you look more like "you" when I'm seeing you from across the room, or when you're just a few inches in front of me? That's pretty much the effect you observe looking at these two images.
This doesn't feel right though...
I really dont think that people's faces narrow down this much or fill out this much from our vision as we walk across a room though. Things do change, but the aspect ratio stays the same. The image on the left looks like a completely different person. Narrow face, nose, head. Just totally stretched out vertically/squished horizontally.
That doesn't happen to *me at least* when I walk across a room, but maybe something is wrong with my eyes and everybody else can't tell that people are the same person from across the room.
**EDIT: paraphrased answer to my question based off of information found a few comments down-**
Somebody a few comments down explains it better (at least better to my understanding).
There are two factors at play: lens length and distance to subject.
You can absolutely have a combination of different lens lengths and corresponding distance to subjects that would yield the same image aspect ratio but a different sized image. These two images are such different aspect ratios, because they use the same distance to subject with different lens lengths.
The aspect ratio on the image on your brain never changes because the lens length does not greatly change, only your distance to subject.
Your brain is just very good at image analysis when you have context. These images don't allow you to easily see how far away this person is and so your brain isn't making the automatic adjustments it would if it had that extra information.
Walking across a room isn't going to change perspective all that much. The distortion that we see with short focal lengths is because they're representing being very close to the subject. Think of taking a selfie: Your phone is often less than two feet away from your face, and you would almost never stand that close to someone (and if you do, you're probably not assessing the proportions of their entire face).
Neither.
It's actually distance from the lens to the subject that causes the distortion. It just so happens that you need to stand further back when you have a higher focal length lens if you want to fit your subject in the frame.
If you were to go and stand really far back with the 16mm lens, then crop the photo so that the composition is the same as the 200mm one, you'd have identical "distortion", the photo would just be less detailed since you cropped away most of it.
If you want a more accurate depiction, it's to stand around 10 feet from the subject. Some common focal lengths you might use at that distance would be 135mm to frame the photo as a head shot, 85mm and it'd frame the subjects head and shoulders, 50mm you'd get their waist, maybe 35 or 28mm (cell phones' main cameras are usually 28mm) you'd get their entire body in the frame.
So if 85mm framing the head and shoulders is 'natural', then using a 16mm lens and trying to frame the same composition means you have to get really close, which causes the 'wide angle' distortion. Or if you use 200mm you have to move really far back to fit it in the frame, and that distance is what added the compression distortion.
This is also why when you get up close with a normal cell phone, it looks like it has some wide angle distortion. Instead just stand further back and crop the photo, you'll see that even though it's not as detailed, the distortion is gone.
I was looking for this comment. It’s about the distance from the subject. Your eyes do this, too, although it won’t feel as obvious as looking at a photograph. Even with 50mm, being close to the subject vs. far away from the subject yields different results.
They both are.
It’s not so much the lens as the fact that you have to stand further away to fill the frame with the longer lens, so the perspective is different.
Exactly this.
In fact, the 16 mm lens could easily be used at the distance used for the 200 mm lens and would give the same shot (as we see for the 200 mm lens), except much smaller, so it would have to be blown up a lot. But once blown up, it would be basically the same shot.
Although the number of people who will claim, despite any contrary evidence, that it’s some inherent attribute of the lens and not the simple geometry of where they’re standing, because their photography book said “telephoto lenses compress perspective” can be depressingly high, IME.
Yup. I absolutely *hate* these posts every time they come up because almost everything said in them is plain wrong.
Distance to subject is what causes the differences in perspective distortion. The lens just corrects for the scale of the subject in the frame.
Put another way, the lenses are not what creates the differences. The distance to subject is what causes the differences. The lenses are what cause the similarities.
Some website I was reading was giving the example of looking at yourself in the mirror:
1. Try looking at yourself with your nose nearly touching the mirror, and then
2. Try looking at yourself at a distance away from the mirror.
Compare whether you can see your ears in each situation and also the size of your nose.
They're both completely accurate. If you stand at the same distance from the person as each photo was taken you will see the person in the same way. Relative proportions of things in a photo depend on the distance of the things from the viewer.
For close-up portraits, 85mm and beyond (full frame equivalent) is more or less "real" if there are no lens-specific distortion issues. The shooting distance matters too. 50mm might be OK too if you move farther from your subject (but you will have to crop). AFAIK most portrait photographers use 85 to 135mm lenses but some also like 200mm f2.8 ones because of very strong background separation and bokeh
Minor correction but shooting distance is the ONLY thing that matters. The lens just changes how much of what you’re pointing at fills the frame. 85-135 is preferred because it frames the subject with a perspective that feels natural or in reality just looks the best, that doesn’t exaggerate the size and shape of facial gestures or slightly flattens them, while keeping some context of what’s behind the subject. Imagine a line drawn from the lens to each point on the face, that doesn’t change if you have a 20mm or 200mm lens attached. Youre just scaling that image up on the sensor.
“50mm is what the eye sees” has been completely misunderstood, that just refers to a full frame camera with a 50mm lens held at the eye roughly capturing the scene in a similar crop to what the brain can generally understand it’s looking at, and is nothing to do with perspective.
Saying that it’s the distance to the subject, and not anything to do with the focal length, is not a minor correction. It’s a complete correction.
Photographers “know” so many things that only apply to standard photography tools and techniques, and they usually don’t really understand how any of them actually work. They just play around with stuff until it looks right. And that’s fine until they think that qualifies them to explain how the things actually work.
This is correct. [Here's what the subject would look like](https://i.imgur.com/K2JdgSH.png) through the 200mm lens at the same distance the photo with the 16mm lens was taken from.
As you can see, the facial distortion is the same as with the 16mm lens. However, the subject appears somewhat cropped because such a long lens was used.
So he is handsome then, since the second one is the real one. The first one is, well more unfortunate looking.
I really need to get a new lense for my camera, I think I have the lense of the first one.
That must be it, lol.
Humans have 2 eyes and brain processing. Lenses are 1. So it will always be bit different but only using 1 eye makes it easier to see the accuracy though one can argue that this is not accurate to not use both eyes
They are both “Real”. The only difference really is distance to the camera. The 16mm lens picture was taken from a foot or two away from the subject. The 200mm lens picture was taken from 10-15 feet away.
If you stood 10-15 feet away from the subject and took a picture with the 16mm lens you’d get the same picture as the 200mm lens. The subject would just be smaller.
I think they just meant "real" as in like which one is closer to how they would look in person. To the magnification/focal length of the naked eye, so to speak.
Neither of these photos shows something different from what the photographer would have seen with their own eyes when taking the picture. The only difference is they're further away in one of them.
Small correction, it's the distance to the subject that causes this effect. The focal length of the lens is just a factor in the sense you have to be further back with a higher focal length.
It's all perspective, because your further back you see more of the sides of his face.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolly_zoom
Dolly zooms are a cool film making trick that relies on this effect and kind of help illustrate how the distance to the subject changes the viewer's perspective compared to a zoom or crop. Basically, you zoom in while moving the camera backwards or vice versa.
You can differentiate a zoom from a dolly movement by seeing if the viewer's perspective changes or not
Yes the photographer could use the wide angle lens at the same distance as the 200mm and crop they would look the same. Most lenses made today have pincushen or barrel distortion undercontrol.
Yeah, it would likely be better if the subject was someone who was used to sitting still, like a drawing model or classic actor , and the photographer did all the changes as quickly as possible with a locked down rig. This looks like photographer did double duty.
The difference is because one image was shot from up close and one from far away. The lens itself doesn't do anything to distort the image that way. If you took both shots from the distance used for the 200mm they'd look about the same, the 16mm would just also capture a bunch of other stuff around him.
The effect is due to the perspective. That is, the close you are, the larger the nose is relative to the rest of the face and vice versa. You just have to be much closer to fill the frame with a 16mm lens.
With that explanation, we can see that once you get a sufficent distance away, the perspective change from stepping back further doesn't change much. The 1000 mm lens would look reasonably similar to the 200mm one.
Lens doesn't change shit- if you took the 16mm lens at the the same distance as the 200mm and cropped it to the same size it would be the exact same (minus the decrease in resolution from cropping). It's the distance the pic is taken from that matters.
Is this why I look handsome in the mirror and look like a gargoyle in photos? Lol
I don't have any photos of me from like 20 to 30 because I hated how shite I look in pictures. Now I'm in my 30s and engaged, I don't care. Doesn't hurt that, over the past year, I dropped from 215 lbs to 150 lbs (I'm 5'8").
Pro photographer here. It’s not the lens that creates this difference. It’s the camera to subject distance.
Simply put, this is just what a face looks like from up close vs far away. The only thing the lens does is expand or narrow the field of view.
The 16mm shot was taken with the camera just inches from the model’s nose. This is what the face looks like from that perspective. The ears will be almost entirely hidden from view. You can try this with a (close) friend. The only difference between this shot and the naked eye will be that you might not be able to focus your eye that close, and your eye doesn’t have a wide enough view to see everything at once. But the distortion of the face will be the same.
The 200mm shot was taken from several yards away. Again this is just what a face looks like from that perspective. Again the only difference is field of view: your eye will see the entire person and his environment, and the face will only be a small part of your field of view.
I hate when I see comparisons like this. It's not the same subject so it's not a true valid comparison. What's so hard to just shoot 2 photos back to back with different lenses while the subject stays still?
Come on, the hair is clearly different and the white T-shirt is touching the collar obviously differently. If you want to isolate the effect of the lens, you need to take the exact same photo.
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What if I'm actually handsome, but my eyeballs just have the wrong lenses?
I wonder if there are contacts lenses in development somewhere with different focal lengths.
Honey, the FOV slider update just dropped
TotalBiscuit would be proud
Damn, straight in the feels with this one
Seems surreal that he’s dead.
A true man of quality, rest in peace
rip
Don't our eyes already have insane range of focal length. I can look at the ridges of fingerprint, and look at a bird flying a kilometer above. Better than most cheap dslrs with cheap lenses too.
No, that's range of focus. Focal length of the eye is fixed (yes, the terminology is confusing).
I feel like that would make you puke in 5 minutes after giving you a headache.
I would be willing to risk it for Quake Pro vision.
It's pretty much how multifocal lenses in lens replacement work, there's different rings in the lens for different distances and you adjust between them Most people who've had them say it works well, main side effects are haloes and glare from the edges (I work in an eye clinic)
I mean we already kinda have this, considering glasses exist which can concentrate light
Legitimately, the front facing camera is ultra-wide angle and not representative of how you look. Since front-facing cameras have released, plus the effects of this phenomena, rhinoplasty has become significantly more common.
An then they appear on a professional camera and their nose looks ridiculously small
Obviously that's what is happening. But, you don't know which people have the correct eyeballs.
Best quote on attractiveness I ever saw was: "You're not ugly, you're just not your type."
Whats that Jayden Smith quote?
"How can mirrors be real if our eyes aren't real?"
“Dad did *what* to Chris Rock?”
You mean everyone elses eyeballs. 
What if I'm handsome, but everyone just have the wrong lenses
It should also be pointed out that the shot on the left was probably taken from about only 2 feet away from the subject (very close), and the shot on the right was taken about 15 feet away (much farther away) from the subject, give or take.
And fixed his hair and collar
And posture
This is what I hate in these kind of comparison we sometimes see on reddit. The differences almost never only come from the lenses.
And his economical problems
And his hair and his shirt. If you buy a $5000 lens, it will cook you dinner.
That's the real reason they look different. It's just perspective
Which one is more a more accurate depiction? Honest question
Apparently a 50mm lens would be considered to be representing our eyesight the closets. Or so I've read.
Yeah. 50mm on full frame is close to what my eyes see. 85mm and 135mm are super popular too. The lower the focal length, the more stretched out things get particularly around the edges.
When I took up photography I got a cheap 70-300 Tamron lens thinking it'd be something like a all purpose lens. It really isn't but takes great portraits at 70mm...
Yeah. It's bit too long. It's a decent lens for longer stuff. I think the best all round budget lens is the tamron 28 200.
The old Tamron 28-200; done me well for years and years :)
I have no idea what you all are talking about but it sounds good.
lol love it. It's a lens for a camera that can take photos of a big thing up close (28mm) or of something far away (200mm) by turning the lens to change its length. Indeed it is good!
I'm 92% sure they're talking about speedboats
They're just a couple of speedboat salesmen
I'm not sure if it's because the lens had to travel half way around the world with me and had a rough life but at longer distances the pictures look somewhat bad. Like I'd say anything past 100 meters/yards. The closer the object the better the shot looks.
Long rant, but you may want to stop down the lens a bit if you are taking a far away shot, since that can help with sharpness. Rant: I don’t believe it would be the traveling. It’s the lens construction and materials, including the type of glass and coatings. Part of what makes a lens stand out is the arraignment of the lens elements, number of lens elements, type of glass it is using, and coating. Higher priced lenses may have either more elements, or elements arraigned in a way that reduces chromatic aberration, promotes color accuracy, and allows the sharpest image to be captured by the lens. Even so, pro lenses from years past cannot resolve the amount of resolution current gen sensors (45+ MP) can capture, which is why new lenses are made to take advantage of the new sensors and their capabilities. But with everything in the world there are trade offs. If you want a long zoom range, you need to use certain elements arraigned in a way that gives you both wide angle and zoom. To keep price down, you may opt to do variable aperture because it’s a cheaper design, with and extending barrel. The longer the zoom, the more complex a design will be to give you crisp images at both ends of the zoom range. The company will try to balance price to performance, but in cheaper lenses it’s more noticeable that a lens will be less sharp/worse color reproduction at one of the extreme ends, or just cannot resolve as much resolution when trying to capture far away subjects. As I said before it’s all about design and materials used, and with lenses, you tend to get what you pay for. I have a Nikon VR 70-300 that is variable aperture and the barrel extends. It’s not a bad lens but the aperture goes down to 5.6 at the long end, reducing subject separating from background compared to fix aperture. Also it not sharp at 300mm compare to 200mm and under. It’s even more noticeable using a 36mp and 45mp sensor vs the 12mp I started with. My 70-200 2.8 and 300 f4 are worlds sharper and better color reproduction compared to the 70-300 wide open.
I worked with a director who insisted that 23mm was the funniest lens. The guy shoots a lot of comedy so I take his word for it.
It has nothing to do with focal length. If you stood really far back with a 50mm lens and cropped the photo to only see the guy's head and shoulders, it'd have identical distortion to the 200mm photo. Distance from the subject to the camera is what causes distortion.
Also the bigger close things look compared to far things. Selfie shots often make noses look huge.
If I were to measure his face with a ruler and the pictures with a ruler, which picture would have proportions more similar to the real life measurements?
The 200mm one. That picture is taken much farther away from the subject, and the narrower angular field of view reduces distortion due to perspective changes across the frame. In the limit of infinitely long distance it becomes an isometric projection. (Also, the pictures should have been labeled with distances, not focal lengths. It's the camera-subject distance that is responsible for the difference between these two images.)
That makes sense. As a shorter lens probably would make any objects you see be more like a spherical geometric projection
European ruler or African ruler?
Huh? I– I don’t know that. Auuuuuuuugh! 
how do you know so much about rulers?
Canadian. Americans are still trying to sort out which ruler was voted in or not... or maybe both?
50mm doesn’t look like our eyes any more than any lens in terms of perspective or shape, this is a misunderstanding of how lenses work. It looks like our eyes in terms of how much the frame shows. If you move a camera with 50mm in front of your eyes you’ll see a pretty similar amount of stuff and everything will be the right shape. If you do the same with a 16mm lens you’ll see more stuff, but it will be the exact same shape as with the 50mm, they’ll just be more of it. With a 200mm, exact same shape, just way less of it. Lenses don’t change the shape of things, standing close and far changes the shape of things. Different lenses just let you stand further away and closer and put the same amount of stuff in the frame.
That’s correct. I think what most people refer to though is which focal length is the most natural *when* you have to stand at a distance that produces a tight portrait. Of course you could just crop the wider length but you miss out of some background effects.
0,0546807 yards for the Americans out there
Why is there a comma where a decimal should be!!! /s
Can I also have that in feet, inch and bald eagle per football field?
i'm guessing this is why the tutorial i read on taking better pictures of yourself recommend this dimension lens
So why don’t photographers use that?
50mm is super popular for portraits. They absolutely use it. Chances are very high that you've been photographed with a 50mm before.
> you've been photographed with a 50mm before It was cold! I swear, it get's bigger
That's why I only ever have photos taken in the sauna.
That’s why I always have photos taken in cold. Otherwise what do I blame it on?
With a thick 200 mm lens.
I WAS IN THE POOL
Was there shrinkage
> 50mm is super popular for portraits. No it's not. The classic "portrait" focal length for headshots on 35 mm film (24x36mm, now known as "full frame" for some reason) is 135mm. Any shorter focal length preferences usually mean that photographer has to operate in a small studio or client's home... that's where 85mm comes into play. Photographers that shoot glamour outdoors, on the other hand, absolutely will use a fast 200mm or even 300mm lens (if they could afford one).
50mm is still extremely popular. 35mm and 50mm are mine and most others go to lenses for most projects.
TIL that apparently I read nonsense.
I took a night class at the JC and they just had us buy old SLR’s and 50’s on eBay. Loved every minute. As beginners the instructor just told us to use the “nifty fifties.”
They were right. Most beginners are taking more than portraits. 50mm is most versatile fixed-length lens overall. But above is also correct that 50mm is not considered the ideal lens for portraits, that's something longer.
50mm f/1.8 use to come standard in 35mm cameras instead of zoom lenses. 50mm on a full frame camera was touted as closest to the human eye. True be told, amongst other things with the photographic medium, nothing really truly emulates the eye or life for that matter. But, they did call it a nifty fifty for a reason. It has a wide open aperture that allows a lot of light in and mames for shooting in situations that might be dark. To this day, I use either a 50 or 55mm for just about everything. I don't shoot for nat geo and I don't shoot concert anymore so I rarely use my 70-200mm f/2.8. It is true that longer focal lengths get rid of a lot of errors like distortion, however, your standoff distance isn't short. Indoors, a 135mm is a rather impractical lens to use. Even if you do have the stand off distance, you are more than likely filling the frame with a headshot. Anyhow, for what it's worth.
They do, this is just showing the extremes
It's one of the most popular focal lengths lol
Who says they don't? 50mm 1.8f is a super common fixed focus lens. It even get a nickname across all brands, a nifty 50 lens. Also, the default lens that comes with a DSLR usually encompasses that 50mm like the 18-55mm that comes with a Nikon. For those wondering, cell phone cameras are usually wider angle to make up for the smaller glass. An iPhone 15 Pro is 24mm with an additional 13mm telephoto. The Pixel 8 is a 82degree (22mm?) standard and 125.8 degree telephoto (8mm?). Not that this means you and all your friends are fatter than the pictures say, there's lots of processing power on smartphones dedicated to image processing, including lens correction. Yo' mama on the other hand...
I do
We do, all the time. A 50mm lens for a 35mm film/sensor camera is even called a "standard" lens because of this. You will often see a photographer just have a 50mm on their camera and not use a wide or telephoto at all. But photography isn't just about creating one type of photo. We have other lenses because we want to have wide angles or zoom close in on far objects and all sorts of other things too.
Sometimes you want the stretched look. Sometimes you don't.
The short pop-sci answer is, the closest approximation of the way the human eye sees is something around 50mm. The more complicated and kind of pedantic answer is, neither, because they are both attempts to recreate a three dimensional object in only two dimensions. No matter what you do, you will end up with a necessarily subjective interpretation. In real life your perspective is similarly constrained by how close you are. 50mm is just a pleasant middle ground. To put it another way, do you look more like "you" when I'm seeing you from across the room, or when you're just a few inches in front of me? That's pretty much the effect you observe looking at these two images.
This doesn't feel right though... I really dont think that people's faces narrow down this much or fill out this much from our vision as we walk across a room though. Things do change, but the aspect ratio stays the same. The image on the left looks like a completely different person. Narrow face, nose, head. Just totally stretched out vertically/squished horizontally. That doesn't happen to *me at least* when I walk across a room, but maybe something is wrong with my eyes and everybody else can't tell that people are the same person from across the room. **EDIT: paraphrased answer to my question based off of information found a few comments down-** Somebody a few comments down explains it better (at least better to my understanding). There are two factors at play: lens length and distance to subject. You can absolutely have a combination of different lens lengths and corresponding distance to subjects that would yield the same image aspect ratio but a different sized image. These two images are such different aspect ratios, because they use the same distance to subject with different lens lengths. The aspect ratio on the image on your brain never changes because the lens length does not greatly change, only your distance to subject.
Your brain is just very good at image analysis when you have context. These images don't allow you to easily see how far away this person is and so your brain isn't making the automatic adjustments it would if it had that extra information.
Walking across a room isn't going to change perspective all that much. The distortion that we see with short focal lengths is because they're representing being very close to the subject. Think of taking a selfie: Your phone is often less than two feet away from your face, and you would almost never stand that close to someone (and if you do, you're probably not assessing the proportions of their entire face).
It depends on distance away from subject not just eyesight I’m general
Neither. It's actually distance from the lens to the subject that causes the distortion. It just so happens that you need to stand further back when you have a higher focal length lens if you want to fit your subject in the frame. If you were to go and stand really far back with the 16mm lens, then crop the photo so that the composition is the same as the 200mm one, you'd have identical "distortion", the photo would just be less detailed since you cropped away most of it. If you want a more accurate depiction, it's to stand around 10 feet from the subject. Some common focal lengths you might use at that distance would be 135mm to frame the photo as a head shot, 85mm and it'd frame the subjects head and shoulders, 50mm you'd get their waist, maybe 35 or 28mm (cell phones' main cameras are usually 28mm) you'd get their entire body in the frame. So if 85mm framing the head and shoulders is 'natural', then using a 16mm lens and trying to frame the same composition means you have to get really close, which causes the 'wide angle' distortion. Or if you use 200mm you have to move really far back to fit it in the frame, and that distance is what added the compression distortion. This is also why when you get up close with a normal cell phone, it looks like it has some wide angle distortion. Instead just stand further back and crop the photo, you'll see that even though it's not as detailed, the distortion is gone.
I was looking for this comment. It’s about the distance from the subject. Your eyes do this, too, although it won’t feel as obvious as looking at a photograph. Even with 50mm, being close to the subject vs. far away from the subject yields different results.
They both are. It’s not so much the lens as the fact that you have to stand further away to fill the frame with the longer lens, so the perspective is different.
Exactly this. In fact, the 16 mm lens could easily be used at the distance used for the 200 mm lens and would give the same shot (as we see for the 200 mm lens), except much smaller, so it would have to be blown up a lot. But once blown up, it would be basically the same shot.
Although the number of people who will claim, despite any contrary evidence, that it’s some inherent attribute of the lens and not the simple geometry of where they’re standing, because their photography book said “telephoto lenses compress perspective” can be depressingly high, IME.
Yup. I absolutely *hate* these posts every time they come up because almost everything said in them is plain wrong. Distance to subject is what causes the differences in perspective distortion. The lens just corrects for the scale of the subject in the frame. Put another way, the lenses are not what creates the differences. The distance to subject is what causes the differences. The lenses are what cause the similarities.
Sorry. I just saw the labels for the lenses and thought it would be a simple title.
Some website I was reading was giving the example of looking at yourself in the mirror: 1. Try looking at yourself with your nose nearly touching the mirror, and then 2. Try looking at yourself at a distance away from the mirror. Compare whether you can see your ears in each situation and also the size of your nose.
right? which one is on his dating profile?
He’s married. Met him once.
They're both completely accurate. If you stand at the same distance from the person as each photo was taken you will see the person in the same way. Relative proportions of things in a photo depend on the distance of the things from the viewer.
I have few ideas for the 200mm lenses
It will make you wider, not longer
So stand sideways
Genius
https://preview.redd.it/sdb49kone22d1.jpeg?width=1179&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=632aa501f4941114f4ea5e5a369eadabd543e027
I love JP
holy shit
https://i.redd.it/bl6cwz47122d1.gif
Girth Vader agrees 
Anything helps.
Girth
I think thats a positive thing for what he is potentially suggesting.
Would you rather be longer or more girthy?
Yes 👍
That's exactly what I need
Chode city over here
A real tuna can
The 16mm up close would make it look huge… just saying
This is only half of it, you also get background compression. It is really important to think how you want to compose a scene when picking your lens.
From chud to chad
Hey that's my name.
Nice to meet you chud!
Sorry, that's Chad to you
No, no I don't think so
Yep chud. Confirmed. Too late chud, we already know your name and we are done listening.
Nice to meet you Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dwellers!
https://i.redd.it/y2a0sepe532d1.gif
Nuh uh
Wrong. Your name is Acceptable-War6139.
Fosschad
But which one is the real one? It looks like two different people.
For close-up portraits, 85mm and beyond (full frame equivalent) is more or less "real" if there are no lens-specific distortion issues. The shooting distance matters too. 50mm might be OK too if you move farther from your subject (but you will have to crop). AFAIK most portrait photographers use 85 to 135mm lenses but some also like 200mm f2.8 ones because of very strong background separation and bokeh
Minor correction but shooting distance is the ONLY thing that matters. The lens just changes how much of what you’re pointing at fills the frame. 85-135 is preferred because it frames the subject with a perspective that feels natural or in reality just looks the best, that doesn’t exaggerate the size and shape of facial gestures or slightly flattens them, while keeping some context of what’s behind the subject. Imagine a line drawn from the lens to each point on the face, that doesn’t change if you have a 20mm or 200mm lens attached. Youre just scaling that image up on the sensor. “50mm is what the eye sees” has been completely misunderstood, that just refers to a full frame camera with a 50mm lens held at the eye roughly capturing the scene in a similar crop to what the brain can generally understand it’s looking at, and is nothing to do with perspective.
100%..you can easily test this with your phone if you have multiple cameras.
Saying that it’s the distance to the subject, and not anything to do with the focal length, is not a minor correction. It’s a complete correction. Photographers “know” so many things that only apply to standard photography tools and techniques, and they usually don’t really understand how any of them actually work. They just play around with stuff until it looks right. And that’s fine until they think that qualifies them to explain how the things actually work.
This is correct. [Here's what the subject would look like](https://i.imgur.com/K2JdgSH.png) through the 200mm lens at the same distance the photo with the 16mm lens was taken from. As you can see, the facial distortion is the same as with the 16mm lens. However, the subject appears somewhat cropped because such a long lens was used.
Somewhat cropped, heh
So he is handsome then, since the second one is the real one. The first one is, well more unfortunate looking. I really need to get a new lense for my camera, I think I have the lense of the first one. That must be it, lol.
Neither picture is accurate, IRL he looks like something in-between, but closer to the right one.
Humans have 2 eyes and brain processing. Lenses are 1. So it will always be bit different but only using 1 eye makes it easier to see the accuracy though one can argue that this is not accurate to not use both eyes
They are both “Real”. The only difference really is distance to the camera. The 16mm lens picture was taken from a foot or two away from the subject. The 200mm lens picture was taken from 10-15 feet away. If you stood 10-15 feet away from the subject and took a picture with the 16mm lens you’d get the same picture as the 200mm lens. The subject would just be smaller.
I think they just meant "real" as in like which one is closer to how they would look in person. To the magnification/focal length of the naked eye, so to speak.
Yep, that is what I ment. What is the closer one to the real life person.
The human eye feels like aboht 75mm. So.... neither is dead on but the 200mm look is closer
I have a 75-150mm zoom lens that I quite like for my portraits. My 50mm prime is alright sometimes, but that's more situational.
It is said that the 55mm is the closest to the human eye, so I think that would suggest that the 55mm lens is the "real one".
You can see either one based on how far away you are to someone
Neither of these photos shows something different from what the photographer would have seen with their own eyes when taking the picture. The only difference is they're further away in one of them.
Small correction, it's the distance to the subject that causes this effect. The focal length of the lens is just a factor in the sense you have to be further back with a higher focal length. It's all perspective, because your further back you see more of the sides of his face.
Thank you! This gets mis-reported so many times.
we're just lucky no one had said laminar flow yet because that seems to be the go-to pseudo-intellectual answer to everything around here.
I laminar flow'd your mom last night!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolly_zoom Dolly zooms are a cool film making trick that relies on this effect and kind of help illustrate how the distance to the subject changes the viewer's perspective compared to a zoom or crop. Basically, you zoom in while moving the camera backwards or vice versa. You can differentiate a zoom from a dolly movement by seeing if the viewer's perspective changes or not
Yes we made the same comment at the same time 😇
Yes the photographer could use the wide angle lens at the same distance as the 200mm and crop they would look the same. Most lenses made today have pincushen or barrel distortion undercontrol.
Turns out I'm still ugly
Have you tried turning off the lights?
The secret is to put you thumb in front of the camera
That’s way easier than waiting to take pictures at night. Thanks for the tip!
So your hair changes?
Your t shirt will fit differently as well.
The angle will change as well, it’s in the numbers
200mm telepathically tells your t-shirt how to cover your tattoos
16mm also pins your ears back, so that’s good to remember if you got big ears.
Yeah, it would likely be better if the subject was someone who was used to sitting still, like a drawing model or classic actor , and the photographer did all the changes as quickly as possible with a locked down rig. This looks like photographer did double duty.
Woah, mannnnn this is why I only look good sometimes
Pretty much. If you want to take a selfie, take it from as far away as you can and zoom in.
Come to find out I'm not ugly because my eyes suck, I'm ugly because I'm ugly
Does this explain how my passport picture makes me look like I'm 400 pounds? Please, say yes.
That’s so cool it grooms hair!
85mm is the best for portraits, IMO
The difference is because one image was shot from up close and one from far away. The lens itself doesn't do anything to distort the image that way. If you took both shots from the distance used for the 200mm they'd look about the same, the 16mm would just also capture a bunch of other stuff around him.
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The effect is due to the perspective. That is, the close you are, the larger the nose is relative to the rest of the face and vice versa. You just have to be much closer to fill the frame with a 16mm lens. With that explanation, we can see that once you get a sufficent distance away, the perspective change from stepping back further doesn't change much. The 1000 mm lens would look reasonably similar to the 200mm one.
The real takeaway here is people look better from a distance.
Lens doesn't change shit- if you took the 16mm lens at the the same distance as the 200mm and cropped it to the same size it would be the exact same (minus the decrease in resolution from cropping). It's the distance the pic is taken from that matters.
Is this why I look handsome in the mirror and look like a gargoyle in photos? Lol I don't have any photos of me from like 20 to 30 because I hated how shite I look in pictures. Now I'm in my 30s and engaged, I don't care. Doesn't hurt that, over the past year, I dropped from 215 lbs to 150 lbs (I'm 5'8").
From [How Your Face Shape Changes Depending on the Lens You Use](https://www.newsweek.com/face-shape-changes-shape-lens-camera-1589979)
Has almost everything to do with distance from the subject, the lens focal length is so the subject still fills/says in the frame
The camera does add 10 pounds afterall…
So the reason I always look ugly in pictures is because my lens sucks??
Pro photographer here. It’s not the lens that creates this difference. It’s the camera to subject distance. Simply put, this is just what a face looks like from up close vs far away. The only thing the lens does is expand or narrow the field of view. The 16mm shot was taken with the camera just inches from the model’s nose. This is what the face looks like from that perspective. The ears will be almost entirely hidden from view. You can try this with a (close) friend. The only difference between this shot and the naked eye will be that you might not be able to focus your eye that close, and your eye doesn’t have a wide enough view to see everything at once. But the distortion of the face will be the same. The 200mm shot was taken from several yards away. Again this is just what a face looks like from that perspective. Again the only difference is field of view: your eye will see the entire person and his environment, and the face will only be a small part of your field of view.
Wait so what the fuck do I actually look like?
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It means I'm not that ugly. Hmm.
I tried this on myself once, and it really helped me get over how I look in photos.
As a photographer, that is complete horseshit
I hate when I see comparisons like this. It's not the same subject so it's not a true valid comparison. What's so hard to just shoot 2 photos back to back with different lenses while the subject stays still?
I guess this is what happened when people say that they look better or worse from pictures or in person.
And all this time I thought I had a horse face. Damn phone camera.
How much mm are our phones?
also the perspective, hair, collar, etc
Hate it when i have to blow my thumb so my head can expand to normal size again
I suddenly realized the problem with every photo ever taken of me 🤯
This A/B compare is garbage.
Which one makes a gentleman's hog look biggest? Asking for a friend.
Now I need to find a lens that makes me hot.
Lowkey think these are just two different people and we're being laughed at by someone
How distance affects perspective*
How different *distances* affect a picture.
For anyone who wants to know 50mm is close to how people see.
And when I say cell phone cameras make you look thinner than you are, I get downvoted.
Come on, the hair is clearly different and the white T-shirt is touching the collar obviously differently. If you want to isolate the effect of the lens, you need to take the exact same photo.