I personally find the portrait taken with 200mm focal length the most visually appealing because of the blurred background which does not distract. I wonder if this blurring is due to a shallower depth of field, and whether it is possible to incorporate this technique into everyday photography.
marilynjoyce
I think it's crazy how much we can zoom into the background in the 200 mm focal length. Granted, it's not like we can see everything in the background, but the difference in the view behind her is hard to wrap my mind around. It feels like she and the photographer have moved way closer to the alley in the back and retook the photo, not like the photographer kept getting further form her and zooming in.
SuryaTalla22
This makes a lot of sense. I'm wondering if there is a way to compose a single image with multiple components imaged with different focal lengths.
ShonenMind
@SuryaTalla22 That's a cool idea! I think it's definitely possible to concatenate multiple photos, each of different focal length, and combine them together into one cohesive picture. However, what might be difficult is the fact that the picture will probably look pretty distorted; in the picture on this slide, there's really just one person as the main focus, so picking the "right" focal length will be much more intuitive. If you have multiple people, and you apply a different focal length to each person, we might get a collage of giants and elves in one picture.
llejj
It's interesting seeing how different these photos look. I wonder which one is most similar to what the human eye sees.
zepluc
In this series of photographs, it appears that varying the focal length while keeping the subject's size consistent not only impacts the background perspective but also influences the depth of field. With longer focal lengths, the background gets blurrier, indicating a shallower depth of field. I'm curious if we can achieve a shallower depth of field by using a larger sensor with the same lens specifications. Does a same lens specification combined with a larger sensor not imply a smaller field of view?
sueyoungshim
These photos remind me of Nasa's astronomy picture of the day which the crescent moon sets behind a mountain, its arc gracefully crowning an illuminated dome. I was wondering how that photo was taken, but I can now see that it was through the focal length and probably some intense astronomical calculations as well.
emily-xiao
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Songbird94
The person’s not moved at all (but the photographer did)? I just can’t imagine how are these photos taken.
omijimo
would it be possible to take a picture taken at a given focal length and edit it manually so it appears to have been taken at another focal length, rather than going through the effort of taking another photo? it seems like the distortion caused by shorter focal lengths is fairly regular and can be algorithmically determined
stang085
I know that iphones nowadays have portrait mode which can simulate this kind of blurred background effect that you can see on the 200mm photo. I wonder how it does that since you can't really change the lenses on iphones. I was also thinking that maybe it had something to do with the phone having multiple cameras on the back, but it would be cool to figure out how it worked!
ElShroomster
@omijimo
I believe so. Professor Ren talked about something very similar (possibly the same?) in a recent lecture where you can take raw data from a camera and manipulate it using a software.
I personally find the portrait taken with 200mm focal length the most visually appealing because of the blurred background which does not distract. I wonder if this blurring is due to a shallower depth of field, and whether it is possible to incorporate this technique into everyday photography.
I think it's crazy how much we can zoom into the background in the 200 mm focal length. Granted, it's not like we can see everything in the background, but the difference in the view behind her is hard to wrap my mind around. It feels like she and the photographer have moved way closer to the alley in the back and retook the photo, not like the photographer kept getting further form her and zooming in.
This makes a lot of sense. I'm wondering if there is a way to compose a single image with multiple components imaged with different focal lengths.
@SuryaTalla22 That's a cool idea! I think it's definitely possible to concatenate multiple photos, each of different focal length, and combine them together into one cohesive picture. However, what might be difficult is the fact that the picture will probably look pretty distorted; in the picture on this slide, there's really just one person as the main focus, so picking the "right" focal length will be much more intuitive. If you have multiple people, and you apply a different focal length to each person, we might get a collage of giants and elves in one picture.
It's interesting seeing how different these photos look. I wonder which one is most similar to what the human eye sees.
In this series of photographs, it appears that varying the focal length while keeping the subject's size consistent not only impacts the background perspective but also influences the depth of field. With longer focal lengths, the background gets blurrier, indicating a shallower depth of field. I'm curious if we can achieve a shallower depth of field by using a larger sensor with the same lens specifications. Does a same lens specification combined with a larger sensor not imply a smaller field of view?
These photos remind me of Nasa's astronomy picture of the day which the crescent moon sets behind a mountain, its arc gracefully crowning an illuminated dome. I was wondering how that photo was taken, but I can now see that it was through the focal length and probably some intense astronomical calculations as well.
[deleted]
The person’s not moved at all (but the photographer did)? I just can’t imagine how are these photos taken.
would it be possible to take a picture taken at a given focal length and edit it manually so it appears to have been taken at another focal length, rather than going through the effort of taking another photo? it seems like the distortion caused by shorter focal lengths is fairly regular and can be algorithmically determined
I know that iphones nowadays have portrait mode which can simulate this kind of blurred background effect that you can see on the 200mm photo. I wonder how it does that since you can't really change the lenses on iphones. I was also thinking that maybe it had something to do with the phone having multiple cameras on the back, but it would be cool to figure out how it worked!
@omijimo I believe so. Professor Ren talked about something very similar (possibly the same?) in a recent lecture where you can take raw data from a camera and manipulate it using a software.