Exercise: Focal Lengths

For this exercise, I had to find an open view with some detail in the background, and take a number of pictures of the same spot each with a different focal length, to see what difference the focal length makes to a picture.
Living in the countryside, i chose a field with a large tree as my subject.
I used an 18 - 55mm lense on my camera and these are the outcomes i got:

This photo was taken with the shortest focal length available on my camera, 18mm. I like the wide angle on this photograph, and how the sky and ground seem to both occupy equal parts of the picture.

The next photograph i took,  was with a focal length of 24mm, again still a slightly wide angled shot , but slightly more zoomed in on the tree, the higher the focal length of a picture, the more magnified the picture.

This photograph was taken with a focal length of 42mm , the tree in this picture is a lot more magnified than the last.

The final picture i took was with a 55mm focal length, the longest focal length available to me, as you can see the tree occupies more than half of the frame, a big difference from the the first photograph (18mm) Where you can hardly see any detail on the tree, as it takes up less than 1/8th on the frame.

I also own a wide angle lens for my camera, and so repeated the exercise again with this lens, just taking a few photographs to see the effects of different focal lengths on different lenses.


This photograph was taken with a wide angle lens, with the shortest focal length, 18mm. The angle of view is a lot wider than the 18mm photograph taken with a standard lens.

I then took a photograph with the wide angle lens, with the largest focal length, 55mm, This is obviously a lot more magnified than the previous picture, But there is still a big different between this 55mm focal length and that of the one with a standard lens. The angle of view on this photograph is more similar to that of a focal length of 42mm on the standard lens than it is to that of the same focal length.




In this setting, I do prefer the effects of a shorter focal length, i like the atmosphere the wide angle of view creates. The equal amounts of sky & ground and the darkness of a small, half barren tree in the background make it more dramatic, and give the photograph, in my opinion, a lot more character and depth of those more magnified, with a longer focal length.