My favorite focal length is a 35mm lens, sometimes even a 28mm lens. I use it at a lot of events and for my reportage photography. I prefer short focal lengths because I always want to get as close to the people as possible, but I also want to capture a lot of the surroundings.
The main difference between lenses is the size of the angle of view. A large angle of view is referred to as a wide-angle lens, while a small angle of view is a telephoto lens.
However, the focal length is more commonly used than the angle of view. But this is where confusion arises again. A 50mm lens on a full-frame camera provides a different angle of view than a 50mm lens on a camera with a small APS-C sensor. (By the way, the size of the sensor says nothing about the quality of the photo!) If you use the 50mm lens with an APS-C sensor, you have to add an extension factor, the so-called crop factor of 1.5. 50mm with ASP-C then corresponds to a 75mm focal length with a full-frame camera.
It is often claimed that a telephoto lens brings objects closer together. Strictly speaking, this is not true. If the resolution of the photo were high enough, I could cut out the section that I photographed at 200mm from the image at 17mm. It contains exactly the same image information, it is just significantly smaller in a wide-angle shot. Things only change when I change my position in relation to the object.
Experiment
Take a piece of cardboard and cut a rectangle the size of the camera sensor (full format 36 x 24mm, ASP-C approx. 23 x 15mm) If you look through the cut-out, you will notice that you can see more of the surroundings the closer the card is to your eye, i.e. the shorter the distance. If, on the other hand, you hold the map further away, the angle of view narrows and you only see a narrower section. This is exactly what happens with the different focal lengths.
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- 17mm f/8
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- 20mm f/8
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- 24mm f/8
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- 35mm f/8
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- 50mm f/8
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- 70mm f/8
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- 100mm f/8
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- 135mm f/8
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- 200mm f/8
