How to Calculate angle of view.

Peter C.

Peter C.

Veteran
I have an outdoor stage performance coming up and they're setting up a platform for me but want it as close to the stage . How do I calculate how far back I need to be to get the entire stage (which is 68 ft wide) in the frame?
I'm using a Panasonic UX90 1" sensor, the widest angle of its zoom lens is 24.5mm.

I know I could setup my camera at the location to find this out but it would save me a trip out to the venue and I could give them an answer now.
 
Can you measure 68' and test the distance back in a parking lot or park to know for sure?
 
50' away from stage

It's right triangle trigonometry since you know the field of view of the lens and the width of the stage. So, it's a right triangle where one side is half the width of the stage, the opposing angle is half the degrees of your lens' field of view, and the 2 adjacent angles are 90 degrees and (90 - half your lens field of view)

But I just went to this guy's website and plugged in the numbers. http://www.bobatkins.com/photography/technical/field_of_view.html

50' away gives you 73.47' wide frame with a 24.5mm (full-frame equivalent lens)
 
Thanks I'll do both it's raining today but I'll try a test in my backyard to confirm. When I did a test in my house window frame. I needed to be roughly back the distance of width so 50' sounds right.
 
I come up with a different answer using a 2.7 crop factor. To be more precise the usable area of the sensor should be used in calculating that factor, e.g. if in camera stabilization is a feature.
 
cyvideo said:
Using the chart of sensor dimension on this page:
http://photoseek.com/2013/compare-d...ame-35mm-aps-c-micro-four-thirds-1-inch-type/

and the FOV calculator on this page you should be able to calculate FOV for most sensor and lens combos:
https://www.scantips.com/lights/fieldofview.html

Chris Young
Click to expand...
I used that same site and couple others to make sure I was using the right numbers. It can be a bit confusing at first understanding the terms.
If anyone wants to check my math. So the stage is actually 64ft My camera has 9mm lens at it's widest but with a 1" sensor at 2.7 crop x 9mm = 24.3mm (which it has listed on the lens barrel)
44' distance = 64' width
48' distance = 68' width
50' distance = 71' width

So I suggested 50' distance to give me 7ft margin of error
 
I keep an app on my phone called pCAM which has a number of relevant shooting tools, including field of view.
It has come in handy a number of times.
 
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