Can a 50mm lens on a DX camera replicate the look of an 11mm ultra-wide lens?
Asked 9/21/2018
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I want to understand whether I can make photos like those taken with an 11mm lens by using a 50mm lens on a DX camera. I assume I would need to stop down a lot for depth of field and move farther back to fit everything into the frame. Aside from that, is there anything that would prevent me from getting the same result? If not, what would I need to do with a 50mm lens on DX to achieve a similar image?
Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
Photography Stack Exchange contributor
7y ago
2 Answers
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What would I have to do to take such photos from a 50mm lens of a Dx camera?
You can't take those pictures with a 50mm lens and a DX (1.5X APS-C) camera.
To fit all of what an 11mm lens will give you you'd have to back up five times as far. But that would change the perspective, or distance relationships between the various parts of the scene. To get those photos you must have the camera in the same position and a lens than can shoot that wide. There's no other way to do it in a single shot.
The closest alternative using a 50mm lens would be to put the camera on a panoramic head that rotates the camera around the optical center of the lens, take a grid of overlapping frames (going both left to right and up to down) until all of the scene is included and then stitch them together after the fact.
The only thing you can replicate more or less exactly with the same camera and a different focal length lens by changing your shooting distance is a perfectly flat target that is perpendicular to the optical axis of the lens. For everything else, the change in perspective will change the way the various parts of the scene look compared to the other parts of the scene.
Originally by user15871. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
user15871
7y ago
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Not in a single shot. An 11mm lens and a 50mm lens give very different angles of view.
To include the same scene with a 50mm on DX, you would need to move much farther back. But changing camera position changes perspective: the apparent size and spacing of near and far objects will no longer match the ultra-wide look. So even if everything fits in frame, it won’t look the same.
Depth of field is only part of the issue. The main limitation is field of view and the perspective that comes from shooting from a specific position.
If you need that exact ultra-wide composition from the same spot, you need a much wider lens.
The closest workaround with a 50mm is to shoot a stitched panorama: mount the camera on a panoramic head, rotate around the lens’s optical center, capture overlapping frames in a grid, and stitch them afterward. That can reproduce the wider field of view, but it is not the same as taking one frame with an 11mm lens, and it may still differ in practical use depending on the scene.
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