When a lens is focused at infinity, is the sensor one focal length away, and why doesn’t the whole scene collapse to one point?
Asked 3/10/2016
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In thin-lens optics, focusing at infinity places the image plane at the focal length from the lens’s optical center. On a real camera, when the focus ring is set to infinity, does that mean the sensor is effectively at that focal distance? If so, why doesn’t the entire scene shrink to a single point at the focal plane? I’m trying to reconcile the simple ray-diagram idea of rays meeting at the focal point with how a full image is actually formed.
Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
Photography Stack Exchange contributor
10y ago
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Does focusing at infinity mean the sensor is at F?
Yes. The definition of focal length is that it's the distance from the optical center of the lens to the image plane when the lens is focused at infinity.
an object focused at infinity should correspond to the sensor position exactly at F
True, although it's obviously the lens that moves and not the sensor.
It also means that the image of every point in the scene will be diminished to a single point.
No, it doesn't mean that at all. I can see how you'd get that idea, since simple lens diagrams tend to show two or three horizontal rays converging at the focal point, but in reality light rays are coming from all points inside the field of view, which means they're coming in at a range of angles. Rays coming in at different angles converge at different points, and together all those points form the image plane.
when I focus my camera to its far end of the focus ring, is there a way to determine how far away the sensor is from F?
As discussed above, with the lens focused at infinity, the distance from the optical center to the sensor is the focal length (usually written as ƒ). Just know that lenses typically have a focal length that's slightly different from the nominal focal length -- your 50mm lens might actually be a 49.3mm lens or a 51.4mm lens, but it's still known as a 50mm lens because that's a standard focal length that gets the idea across just fine.
And if so, how does one understand the magnification (everything turning into a small point) at F?
When a of light enters one kind of material from another, like from air into glass, that ray is bent by some amount. This is refraction. How much the ray is bent depends on several factors: the angle of incidence, the refractive indices of the materials, and to some degree the color of the light. But the rays coming from different angles don't all get bent so much that every ray ends up converging at the same point. An easy way to see that, if you're imagining a thin double-convex lens like you typically see in diagrams, is to consider all the rays that pass through the point that's located at distance F in front of the lens. Those rays end up exiting the lens so that they're parallel and don't converge at all, for exactly the same reason that parallel rays entering the lens converge at the focal point. If you can see that, then you know that rays coming from different parts of the scene, i.e. different directions, get mapped to different points in the image.
Originally by user4262. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
user4262
10y ago
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For an ideal thin lens, yes: when focused at infinity, the image plane is one focal length from the lens’s optical center. In a real photographic lens, the exact reference point is not as simple because complex lenses don’t behave like a single thin element, but the concept still holds: infinity focus places the image plane at the lens’s focal distance as defined for that lens.
What does not happen is the whole scene collapsing to one point. The focal point is only where rays that are parallel to the optical axis meet. But a real scene sends light toward the lens from many different directions. Rays from each scene point arrive at their own angle, and the lens focuses each direction to a different point on the sensor. That collection of many focused points forms the image.
So at infinity focus, each distant subject point maps to a point on the sensor, not the entire scene to one point. Simple diagrams are easy to misread because they usually show only a few rays for one object point or one off-axis direction.
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