Angle-of-view

The angle-of-view is basically how wide an area is covered by a given lens.
Angle-of-view is influenced by two variables – the focal length of the lens, and the size of the area of light sensitive material used to capture your image. Typically, if you double the focal length of your lens you will get half as much in the frame.

Different image formats also affect the angle-of-view. For example, the 50mm standard lens on a 35mm camera would be considered to be a wide-angle lens on a larger format camera such as a 6x7 roll film camera, and on smaller formats 50mm is a telephoto. This difference in the angle-of-view will also affect the depth-of- field. Smaller format cameras will have more in sharp focus for a particular angle-of-view than larger format cameras because the focal length of the lens used will be shorter.

This focal length table gives a rough idea of the equivalent focal lengths of lenses on a compact digital camera with a 2/3inch digital sensor, through to a 5x4in large format camera. Below that is an illustration to show the approximate crop of digital sensors with 1.3x, 1.5x and 2x crop factors.

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