I’ve been trying to work this out but I can’t quite.
85mm f1.4 looks great
70-200 f2.8 @200mm looks great too (better?)
If you crop 85mm to 200mm you would get 200mm f3.3 equiv. So the 70-200 is actually better.
Ok so 105mm f1.4 exists… That’s 200mm f2.66 equiv. 135mm f1.8 is the exact same equiv. But you have to crop (not ideal).
Is there anything better still?
Does subject distance matter? Maybe with a 50mm f1.2 but with you physically closer depth of field would be more shallow? Probably not.
I don’t care about having the whole car in focus, I just want critical focus on one part and a super dramatic look.
You must log in or register to comment.
Bigger sensor (mediums/large format) or bigger “equivalent” sensor. Basically zoom all the way in on your longest lens, set your focus and aperture, and take a panorama with however many photos it takes to fill the frame you want. You’ll probably end up with hundreds of photos. Automerge them in Photoshop, and resize the resulting image to something more reasonable, unless you want it with gigapixel resolution. If you do it right (and by that I mean you don’t miss a part of the photo resulting in a blank gap) or your computer doesn’t run out of memory, it will absolutely have the effect you’re and looking for. Source: I’ve done this many times with landscapes to tremendous success.
So you’re just doing a massive in close focus stack?
That would be way too extreme, I think. You back up to where the objects of interest (the one in focus) approximately fills the frame. Closer if the object is stationary. Then you just take a standard panorama at your widest aperture. Generally I’ve found once your final image goes beyond 35mm or 50mm equivalent field of view, the panorama fails to merge or the Photoshop function starts to make wacky assumptions about distortion.
Damn this is so cool
So I could use a wider focal length, get quite close to the car so there’s a SUPER shallow dof and then take lots of pictures to make it fill the imaginary frame.
I will try! Thank you!
Oh shit look at that, it has a name.
For the smallest focal depth, macro.
Depth of field is a factor of the aperture selected, and nothing else. But to make the subject appear the same size when using crop factor lenses the subject needs to be further away from the camera. DOF increases with subject to camera distance (focal length) so cropped bodies / sensors appear to impact DOF because they are shooting at a longer focal length to achieve the same look. That’s one reason why cropped systems struggle to get as good bokeh / subject separation as full frame systems.
There are other factors regarding sharpness that could be at play. Most lenses have a sweet spot for sharpness at a particular f-stop (or focal length if it’s a zoom lens), which is not usually wide open.
Just use the Brenizer method.
I like the 70-200/2.8 for full car images and don’t forget how the background affects the shots. I will also use a 16-35/4 and 50/1.2 on interior and detail shots.
Here’s an idea, just take good photos and stop worrying about the math
If you were looking for a single-frame solution, for full frame cameras, 200mm f2 exists and is relatively easily available, and at some point Canon and Nikon experimented with 200 F1.8 and 300 f2, which are next to impossible to get your hands on.
