This gif explains how changing focal length impacts a portrait
Oct 16, 2023
Dunja Đuđić
Dunja Djudjic is a multi-talented artist based in Novi Sad, Serbia. With 15 years of experience as a photographer, she specializes in capturing the beauty of nature, travel, concerts, and fine art. In addition to her photography, Dunja also expresses her creativity through writing, embroidery, and jewelry making.
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One of the “fun facts” I remember from my photography classes was that “wide-angle lenses are not for portraits”. Of course, you can always experiment and photograph people with wider focal lengths, but the truth is – it does make them seem a bit weird in the photos. This fun gif shows precisely how the change of focal length affects the face of a person you’re photographing.
Focal length and portraits – the animation
Focal length and portraits – breakdown
Lenses with smaller focal lengths distort the face so it looks thinner, while those over 50mm make it more realistic and wider. So, from now on, I’m going to take photos of myself only with wide-angle lenses.
Of course, as you can see from the gif, this theory is true as long as the face takes up the same space within the frame. Cropping doesn’t count, only “zooming with your feet”. After all, you can easily try it at home; even a kit lens will do the trick. Let us know how it turned out for you.
[via reddit]
Dunja Đuđić
Dunja Djudjic is a multi-talented artist based in Novi Sad, Serbia. With 15 years of experience as a photographer, she specializes in capturing the beauty of nature, travel, concerts, and fine art. In addition to her photography, Dunja also expresses her creativity through writing, embroidery, and jewelry making.
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22 responses to “This gif explains how changing focal length impacts a portrait”
For a 24×36 I’d say around 80mm…
If distance to the lens is the same accompanied with cropping there is no difference. How do you think phone cameras do it.
You start zooming with your feet and of course now subject to lens distance changes and we see the effects above
120-300 2.8
His hair gets bigger :)
35mm f/1.4
Bad hair day Jared? :D
It’s the distance from the subject that does this, not the focal length.
Does focal length not effect perspective in anyway what so ever? I assumed due to the angle of the field of view faces looked thin (wide angle) or normal (telephoto/narrow angle)? I’m confused now haha
I think what Matt is saying is that crop affects field of view, which is true. Although it has become convention to use the focal length on 35mm cameras to express field of view, we can also crop an image or use a smaller sensor to reduce the field of view. This is why the focal length for micro four thirds (e.g. 18mm, 25mm, 40mm) effectively corresponds to approximately double the focal length on a 35mm camera (36mm, 50mm, 80mm), even though the actual focal length of a lens does not change at all. What does change is the crop and therefore the field of view we associate with each respective focal length on a standard 35mm camera.
It’s not just crop. Notice how the angles of his face change in their degrees once you’re changing the focal length, making lines increasingly diverge the lower the focal length.
Yes. Crop and focal length affect the field of view. Cinematographers/DPs take advantage of this in the dolly zoom. The tighter crop of Micro 4/3 simulates a higher focal length even though the lens remains unchanged.
It’s not the change in FL that causes those effects, it’s the change in subject distance.
Take a shot from the same distance with a 50mm and 100mm, crop the 50mm to match the FOV, and they’ll look identical (other than IQ variations of different lenses/crops).
It affects only the size of the frame relative to the subject. If you took a portrait at 200mm so that the face fills the frame, then switched to 28mm without moving your feet, the distortion in the face would be exactly the same, but it wouldn’t nearly fill the frame. Here’s a gif of the effect where all the photos were taken at 28mm, but at different distances, and the frames cropped to match: https://i.imgur.com/KzwKcwz.mp4
Matt is an idiot. Distance to subject, distance to background and focal length all play a part.
what about 600mm? :)
https://youtu.be/7yP626vLCGY?t=4m55s
Not this again. It’s not focal length, it’s camera position/perspective.
I shoot them a lot with my 70-200 2.8 a lot of times I look at the lens and I’ve naturally zoomed it to the 135mm area most of the time without looking at it so I guess my eyes seem to like 135
So which one’s the way people see normally?
50mm. At least if this is a full-frame DSLR.
Why male models?
why not? I mean, it’s literally a 50%/50% choice.
What a weird question