Suggestion on a Lens

J

jrod81

Veteran
Hey guys
Getting ready for a dinner scene and wanting to do an aerial shot of the table, but i want it wide enough to see the actor's reaching for the bowls of food. It is an 7 foot table (or so)... There is a chandelier hanging down over the table... I can take that down or I can put the camera in it. So, how wide of a lens would you guys suggest? I am going to rent and figure I have one shot to get the right lens.
thanks
jared
 
jrod81 said:
Hey guys
Getting ready for a dinner scene and wanting to do an aerial shot of the table, but i want it wide enough to see the actor's reaching for the bowls of food. It is an 7 foot table (or so)... There is a chandelier hanging down over the table... I can take that down or I can put the camera in it. So, how wide of a lens would you guys suggest? I am going to rent and figure I have one shot to get the right lens.
thanks
jared
Click to expand...


This appears to be a pretty simple trig question...

Think of the camera at one vertex of a triangle, the table length is one of the sides of the triangle.

I simplified by thinking of this as a camera pointed straight down, and used trig functions for a right triangle.

Most houses have 8 foot ceilings. So 30" for the table top from the floor, another 24" for the seated people, yields a distance from the camera up against the ceiling of 42", or about 3.5' to the 'tops of the people's heads'... unless you want to crop out heads...

1/2 the total lenght of this 'plane', the tops of the heads, for the 7' table, is 3.5 + 1.5 just for any error, yields 5'.

Using the Trig Calculator found here:

Trig Calculator

Using trig funtions, the 'angle of view' needed by the camera is approx 110 degrees.

Using a FOV calculator found here:

Field of View Calculator

For a 7D, yields... no lense over 10mm could do better than 90 deg.

Even if everyone crowded into the table, and using the 3.5 feet of 'just the table length' (that is no one setting at the head or foot of the table), yields a required FOV of 90 deg. From the above FOV calculator, an 11mm lens would just barely do it, 10mm would be marginally better...

If the setting has a high ceiling, then using the appropriate trig values to recalculate the required FOV, and then look up what lens can do that...
 
No fisheye issues at all with the Tokina 11-16.. The Tokina 10-17 will give you a fisheye effect.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top