Right Lens for a human subjective

Duca Simon Luchini · June 24, 2016

Hi everybody,

which kind of lens do you suggest to use for a "Normal" human view (Subjective)?

I read the huamn Angle of view is pretty 120 degrees but a lenses with this AOV are very wide angle... as 24, 16, 8mm! They distort images and it doesn't happen in a normal eyes view. Practically, I have seen that with a 35mm you can provide to give a credible human view, maybe also with a 40, 45, 50mm.

What are your experience about? Shortly, if you have to shoot a subjective, which kind al lens do you use?

ATTENTION: I mean a "normal" human subjective, without any creative or emotional functions!

Many thanks for a reply!

David Mullen ASC · June 24, 2016

There is rarely a reason to shoot a shot that has no creative or emotional nor storytelling functions, all of which will affect your choice of focal length.

But as you said, human vision, due to peripheral vision, has a very wide-angle view and yet a 35mm-ish focal length on a 35mm movie camera (or APS-C digital still camera) is close to what is considered a "normal" lens that neither compresses or expands perspective -- if you set up the camera on a tripod and looked through the viewfinder and then with your own eyes, the objects in front of you would look similar in size, distance, and perspective.

A lot of this difference between the wide view of human vision and the less wide-angle focal length of normal lenses is due to the size of most images on a screen, the fact that film images have a border and we look at them far enough away to see the border.

An example to show this is IMAX. Often IMAX photography is done with wider-angle lenses but you usually sit close enough to the screen that the borders start to go outside to the edges of your vision and you essentially concentrate on a smaller portion in the lower center of the screen -- so in essence, your eyes are "cropping" a wide-angle image into a more normal focal length, so the wide-angle photography doesn't "feel" wide-angle. But sit in the back row or look at a frame from a true IMAX movie on your computer, and it often looks very wide-angle.

But since most of us don't shoot for giant projection, we have to decide whether to match the wider view of human vision using shorter focal lengths, or the perspective and natural subject size using closer to normal focal lengths, or the way the human eye-brain picks out a detail from a distant subject using a zoom or telephoto lens -- in other words, it's a creative, emotional, storytelling decision.