Lenses

The lens changes not just how much we see, but how space feels. Focal length is measured in millimetres, and it decides whether the world stretches away from your subject or piles up behind them.

Nested field-of-view cones from a camera, from a wide 14mm down to a narrow 200mm 14mm 24mm 50mm 200mm Camera
Angle of view at full-frame equivalents. The jump from 14mm to 24mm changes the frame far more than the jump from 50mm to 200mm; focal length is not a linear scale. An 85mm sits just inside the 50mm wedge shown here.

The three families

Wide · roughly 14–28mm

Exaggerates depth. Close objects look big, distant ones look far away, and a face placed near the lens distorts. Used for immersion, unease and grand spaces.

Normal · ~35mm S35 / ~50mm FF

Approximates human perception. Neither stretched nor flattened. The lens that gets out of the way and lets performance carry the shot.

Telephoto · 85mm and up

Compresses space. The background appears closer to the subject and the image flattens, which is perfect for isolating a face in a crowd or making a chase feel claustrophobic.

Wide lensBackground pushed away and small. Lots of air around the subject.
Telephoto lensSame subject size, but the background looms. That is compression.

Lens types

Prime
One fixed focal length. Usually sharper and faster (wider maximum aperture) than a zoom, which is why shallow-focus looks tend to live here. It also forces you to move the camera rather than adjust the frame from where you stand.
Zoom
Covers a range of focal lengths. Faster to work with on the day, generally slower in aperture and a little less sharp at the extremes.
Anamorphic
Squeezes a wide image onto the sensor and unsqueezes it in post, producing the classic widescreen look: oval bokeh, horizontal lens flares, and a distinctive fall-off in the corners.
Spherical
The ordinary kind: it records the image without squeezing. Cleaner and more neutral; most "invisible" cinematography is spherical.

The dolly zoom

The camera physically moves toward or away from the subject while the lens zooms in the opposite direction. The subject stays exactly the same size while the background appears to stretch or collapse behind them.

Two frames showing the dolly zoom: the subject stays the same size while the background stretches Dolly back + zoom in Background collapses inward
Pioneered in Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958) and made iconic in the beach scene of Jaws (1975). It visualises a sudden psychological shock: the ground moving under someone who has not moved at all.
Rule

Choose the lens for the relationship, not the framing. You can get the same shot size by changing lens or by walking. The lens decides how the subject relates to everything behind them, and that is the part you cannot fix later.

Watch

Ultimate Guide to Camera Lenses (StudioBinder, The Shot List Ep. 7). Reference: StudioBinder's camera lenses guide.

Cinematography & Mise-en-Scène cheat sheets · built from The Foundations of Cinematography and Mise-en-Scène.