Project 1

I did project 1 today entitled "focal length & angle of view". My first learning outcome was "never trust your camera equipment not to let you down". My tamron 70-300mm lens totally jammed and had to go back to Jessops (thankfully still within warranty). However I managed to dig out an old 28-200mm lens from my husband's film SLR and carried on with the project.

My chosen scene for this project was the view from my son's bedroom over to the woods behind our house. I didn't feel an indoor scene would be appropriate for this sort of experiment, but I also didn't fancy changing lenses outside in the rain. Waiting for the rain to stop is no longer an option, as it's rained all week, and I'll be at work in the only available daylight when the clocks change tonight.

Step 1 was to try and find the standard focal length whilst looking through the viewfinder. I did not find this easy to achieve but decided that 65mm seemed to look about right. I have since read up that the viewfinder magnification ratio is 0.87, which means that the standard focal length is more like 55mm (i.e. 65mm * 0.87) which is in line with my expectations. I then followed with wide angle and zoom to complete the project.

The results are shown in order of: zoom, wideangle & standard focal length. The zoom was taken at 163mm, the wideangle at 18mm and the standard focal length was 63mm. My favourite image of the three is actually the one at standard focal length. Although I would have expected such a landscape type scene to display well at a wideangle view, the loss of detail in the trees causes the image to lose appeal. However the wideangle version does give some sense of the scale of the woodland.

The standard focal length image shows some detail in the leaves and trunk, whilst still maintaining the sense of depth of the woodland. This is completely lost in the zoom image, which purely displays colours and textures without any perception of the depth. In reality, the orange leaves are actually some distance behind the trunk, as the 2 trees are on different banks either side of a stream. They appear to be very close together in the zoom image. I was surprised at how evident this was even at 163mm, as I was expecting this would only become apparent on my tamron 300mm at full zoom.

The following day, I completed the task with A4 printouts of the above images. I found that the standard focal length image could be held comfortably at arms length and was the same size as the scene, however I was unable to hold the wideangle print close enough to make it the same size as the scene, and similarly I wasn't able to hold the zoom version far enough to be the same size. This was my expectation given the extremes of the focal length used in this project.

Overall this has been a useful project. Although I covered focal lengths in my previous course at the OU, this project has brought it to life for me personally. Loss of perspective is often demonstrated with buildings, however using trees on different banks struck a chord with me. I am also slightly disappointed with the images, as I feel they lack interest, however the need to keep the momentum up with the projects and ultimately the first assignment in 6 weeks time means I have to move on.