How do you determine framing based on lens size?

Question

I know the rule (for 16mm film) of Lens divided by 10 multiplied by 2 = a close-up of your subject. Here's our plight: say you have a 50mm lens and your subject is 13 feet away. 10 feet is a close-up, how do you determine what you would call the framing of a shot of the subject 13 feet away? MCU, still a CU?, MS?

Answer 1

The best advice to give y ou is for you to purchase a book, probably cheap, that would give lenses in equivalency scales.

This will be very much like the digital lenses that give a 35mm equivalency scale.

you need to know What, for instance, would be the equivalent lens to do what a 135mm lens does on a 35mm camera, but on a 120 (6x6) film, a 645 neg, a 67 neg and a 4x5 and up. Waht you are lookig for is the angle that the lens covers

You can find such charts in a Nikon Handbook, if you can find one, and many other photo books where you can sit down in Borders or Barnes and Noble, look it over, write it down, and not hae to pay for an expensive book.

There may be a ratio to work with, but I know of none myself.

Answer 2

Well this really all depends on the film size of the camera you are dealing with: 35mm, 120, 4x5, or 8x10. 50mm is the standard focal length of a 35mm making a shot from 13 feet away a long shot. For larger film cameras 120 and above a 50 mm lens becomes a wide angle lens, distorting the subject camera distance, so with a 4x5 (a cameras whose standard focal length is 150mm) that same shot now becomes an extreme long distance shot.