Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Angle of view
In photography, angle of view describes the angular extent of a given scene that is imaged by a camera. It is used interchangeably with the more general term field of view. It is important to distinguish the angle of view from the angle of coverage, which describes the angle range that a lens can image. Typically the image circle produced by a lens is large enough to cover the film or sensor completely, possibly including some vignetting toward the edge. If the angle of coverage of the lens does not fill the sensor, the image circle will be visible, typically with strong vignetting toward the edge, and the effective angle of view will be limited to the angle of coverage.
In 1916, Northey showed how to calculate the angle of view using ordinary carpenter's [1] tools. The angle that he labels as the angle of view is the half-angle or "the angle that a straight line would take from the extreme outside of the field of view to the center of the lens;" he notes that manufacturers of lenses use twice this angle.
For a lens projecting a rectilinear image, the angle of view () can be calculated from the chosen dimension (d), and effective focal length (f) as follows:[3]
Angle of view
represents the size of the film (or sensor) in the direction measured. For example, for film that is 36mm wide, mm would be used to obtain the horizontal angle of view. Because this is a trigonometric function, the angle of view does not vary quite linearly with the reciprocal of the focal length. However, except for wide-angle lenses, it is reasonable to approximate degrees. The effective focal length is nearly equal to the stated focal length of the lens (F), except in macro photography where the lens-to-object distance is comparable to the focal length. In this case, the magnification factor (m) must be taken into account: radians or
(In photography is usually defined to be positive, despite the inverted image.) For example, with a magnification ratio of 1:2, we find and thus the angle of view is reduced by 33% compared to focusing on a distant object with the same lens. A second effect which comes into play in macro photography is lens asymmetry (an asymmetric lens is a lens where the aperture appears to have different dimensions when viewed from the front and from the back). The lens asymmetry causes an offset between the nodal plane and pupil positions. The effect can be quantified using the ratio (P) between apparent exit pupil diameter and entrance pupil diameter. The full formula for angle of view now becomes:[]
Angle of view can also be determined using FOV tables or paper or software lens calculators.[4]
Example
Consider a 35 mm camera with a lens having a focal length of F = 50 mm. The dimensions of the 35mm image format are 24mm (vertically) 36mm (horizontal), giving a diagonal of about 43.3mm. At infinity focus, f = F, and the angles of view are: horizontally, vertically, diagonally,
Angle of view
from the image plane (technically, the center of perspective of a rectilinear lens is at the center of its
Now
is the angle between the optical axis of the lens and the ray joining its optical center to the edge of the
film. Here is defined to be the angle-of-view, since it is the angle enclosing the largest object whose image can fit on the film. We want to find the relationship between: the angle the "opposite" side of the right triangle, the "adjacent" side, Using basic trigonometry, we find: (half the film-format dimension)
the lens for infinity focus. Then the angle of view is given by: where
Angle of view Macro photography For macro photography, we cannot neglect the difference between . From the definition of magnification, , we can substitute and with some algebra find: and . From the thin lens formula,
Defining
as the "effective focal length", we get the formula presented above: where .
A second effect which comes into play in macro photography is lens asymmetry (an asymmetric lens is a lens where the aperture appears to have different dimensions when viewed from the front and from the back). The lens asymmetry causes an offset between the nodal plane and pupil positions. The effect can be quantified using the ratio (P) between apparent exit pupil diameter and entrance pupil diameter. The full formula for angle of view now becomes:[]
UV/visible light from an integrating sphere (and/or other source such as a black body) is focused onto a square test target at the focal plane of a collimator (the mirrors in the diagram), such that a virtual image of the test target will be seen infinitely far away by the camera under test. The camera under test senses a real image of the virtual image of the target, and the sensed image is displayed on a monitor.[7]
Angle of view
The sensed image, which includes the target, is displayed on a monitor, where it can be measured. Dimensions of the full image display and of the portion of the image that is the target are determined by inspection (measurements are typically in pixels, but can just as well be inches or cm). = dimension of full image = dimension of image of target The collimator's distant virtual image of the target subtends a certain angle, referred to as the angular extent of the target, that depends on the collimator focal length and the target size. Assuming the sensed image includes the whole target, the angle seen by the camera, its FOV, is this angular extent of the target times the ratio of full image size to target image size.[8] The target's angular extent is:
where
This calculation could be a horizontal or a vertical FOV, depending on how the target and image are measured.
Angle of view
Characteristics
For a given camerasubject distance, longer lenses magnify the subject more. For a given subject magnification (and thus different camerasubject distances), longer lenses appear to compress distance; wider lenses appear to expand the distance between objects. Another result of using a wide angle lens is a greater apparent perspective distortion when the camera is not aligned perpendicularly to the subject: parallel lines converge at the same rate as with a normal lens, but converge more due to the wider total field. For example, buildings appear to be falling backwards much more severely when the camera is pointed upward from ground level than they would if photographed with a normal lens at the same distance from the subject, because more of the subject building is visible in the wide-angle shot. Because different lenses generally require a different camerasubject distance to preserve the size of a subject, changing the angle of view can indirectly distort perspective, changing the apparent relative size of the subject and foreground.
Angle of view If the subject image size remains the same, then at any given aperture all lenses, wide angle and long lenses, will give the same depth of field.[13]
Examples
An example of how lens choice affects angle of view. The photos below were taken by a 35 mm still camera at a constant distance from the subject:
180.0 169.4 122.0 114.2 107.1 94.5 84.1 63.4 46.8 34.4 28.6 23.3 12.4 8.25 6.19 4.96 4.13 180.0 161.1 90.0 81.2 73.9 61.9 53.1 37.8 27.0 19.5 16.1 13.0 6.87 4.58 3.44 2.75 2.29
5.72 1.96
82.4 73.7 54.4 39.6 28.8 23.9 19.5 10.3 6.87 5.15 4.12 2.86* 3.54* 2.58 1.72
Angle of view
Five images using 24, 28, 35, 50 and 72mm equivalent zoom lengths, portrait format, to illustrate angles of view [15]
Five images using 24, 28, 35, 50 and 72mm equivalent step zoom function, to illustrate angles of view
Angle of view
[14] However, most interchangeable-lens digital cameras do not use 24x36 mm image sensors and therefore produce narrower angles of view than set out in the table. See crop factor and the subtopic digital camera issues in the article on wide-angle lenses for further discussion. [15] The image examples uses a 5.1-15.3mm lens which is called a 24mm 3x zoom by the producer ( Ricoh Caplio GX100 (http:/ / www. ricoh. com/ r_dc/ caplio/ gx100/ ))
External links
Angle of View on digital SLR cameras with reduced sensor size (http://www.acapixus.dk/photography/ angle_of_view.htm) Focal Length and Angle of View (http://www.usa.canon.com/app/html/EFLenses101/focal_length.html)
10
License
Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported //creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/