Seeing the Focal Length
Sometime interesting recently. I was able to take photos showing focal length without even trying!
| Aperture | Focal Length | Result |
|---|---|---|
| f/5.14 | 17 mm |
 |
| f/3.91 | 11.5 mm |
 |
| f/2.67 | 6 mm |
 |
Is little Ana Coppola growing taller? Or is everything shrinking around her? Ana and the items in the background haven’t moved a millimeter. Only the camera has moved!
In my prior posting, I tried to understand camera terminology. Now it is time for me to apply them. As the aperture and focal length become smaller numbers, the subject remains the same size (due to moving the camera while zooming to maintain the same size of subject), and the background becomes smaller, wider.
Practically, the higher the focal length, the bigger the background is. The higher the focal length, the more magnified the background is, but the foreground stays the same. How does the camera do this? It must be magic.
I wrote about aperture, … a lower number [aperture] means a narrower depth of field, which leads to a blurry background and [a] close foreground …
. However, the background in f/5.14 looks more blurry to me than the background in f/2.67. I will continue to take photographs where I can compare the aperture, so I can better understand how to control blurring the background when I want to.