How Focal Length and Subject Distance Affect Weight… As Seen with a Cat

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We’ve written a couple of times in the past on how you can achieve drastically different portrait looks by choosing different lens focal lengths and subject distances. Basically, your choice of glass can make a huge impact on what your subject’s face looks like… and how much they appear to weigh.

Reddit user Popocuffs wanted to demonstrate this, but instead of using a human subject, he used his cat.

These photographs are all of the same cat, and were shot using four different focal lengths and distances. The combos range from 29mm from 1 foot away to 105mm from 12 feet away.

As you can see, the lens/distance combos cause the cat to look like everything from the Cheshire Cat to the Catbus.

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As we’ve also shared before, if you use different focal lengths and distances while keeping the subject the same size in the frame, and then string the resulting images together in an animation, you get a Hitchcock zoom.


Image credits: Photographs by Popocuffs and used with permission

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