Actually, mm is a millimeter abbreviation. It is a length unit used to measure lenses and other optical or photography equipment. For example, if you read “28 mm” below a lens’s brand name, it signifies the focal length is 28 millimeters. The greater the number, the broader the photo.
This mm scale indicates how wide the lens’s opening will be, allowing you to determine if it will meet your demands as a photographer. Camera lenses are described using the smallest units of measurement.
A 35mm lens, for example, is a wide-angle lens that is useful for close-up photography, such as portraiture. Many people believe that the mm on a lens represents the diameter of the front element.
It isn’t! Here are a couple of examples using my Nikon 24-85mm f/3.5-4.5G to demonstrate how mm relates to focal length. The focal length of any lens is measured in millimeters. Unlike frame size, the word mm refers to the focal length of the lens rather than its physical breadth.
What is a Camera Lens?
If you’ve ever glanced at the front of a camera, you’ll see that it has multiple glass pieces on it called lenses. A camera lens is an optical device that focuses visible light to generate a picture of a scene at the focal plane for that specific lens.
A camera lens is a piece of equipment that attaches to the front of your camera to assist you in taking better images. Its primary duty is to collect light and transmit it to your digital device, where it is displayed as a picture.
A camera’s lens is an essential component. It catches the light and photographs it. Lenses can be incredibly simple or extremely complex. It is normally situated in front of a camera and is detachable, however, some cameras have permanent lenses.
The lens is a camera’s glass or plastic “eye.” A lens mount, which is connected to a camera, is used to produce pictures by concentrating light onto an image sensor (such as film or a digital camera sensor).
The lens is a piece of optical equipment that is attached to the camera body. It sets the composition of your image by focusing light onto the camera’s image sensor, allowing you to capture a visible image.
A camera lens is an essential component of traditional photography since it allows you to regulate how light influences your image. It’s easy to get caught up in digital photography these days, utilizing the ordinary camera on your cell phone.
However, current cellphones lack the accuracy required for professional tasks. Most smartphone cameras do not create color-accurate photographs, and a lens may make or break the image.
Types of Camera Lenses
Changing the lens on your camera may drastically alter the photographs you capture. View our whole collection of lenses, from wide-angle and telephoto to ultra-wide and fisheye, and get ready to explore this fascinating new creative frontier.
Wide-angle lenses
Wide-angle lenses have a far wider field of vision than standard lenses. They are used to capture a wide-angle image, not simply a face, such as a landscape or a complete structure.
Wide-angle lenses are ideal for capturing images with a large perspective. They may assist you in framing a scene from eye level, allowing you to showcase all types of breathtaking landscapes and building photos.
Landscape and architecture photos benefit greatly from wide-angle lenses. They make distant objects look closer and can be utilized to exaggerate the scale of a structure or a landscape’s larger area.
Wide-angle lenses are the finest choice for fitting more of a scene into your photograph. They are frequently used to photograph big gatherings of people, as well as enormous vistas, architecture, and interiors. Zoom lenses enable you to zoom in close to catch details that a wide-angle lens would be unable to capture.
A wide-angle lens has a focal length that is less than the short side of the film or sensor size. When used on “full-frame” 35mm cameras (i.e., 35 mm film cameras having an image area of 2436 mm), a normal lens provides an angle of view identical to human eyesight.
Most modern digital SLR cameras employ a smaller digital sensor built for APS-C lenses, or the physically bigger “full-frame” 35mm film, to allow them to use a broader range of lenses while still displaying their full-frame equivalency in the camera’s viewfinder or display.
Telephoto lenses
Telephoto lenses are ideal for photographing animals, sports, and other distant objects. There are several types of telephoto lenses, some manufactured by Canon and others by Nikon.
They focus on very small items from very far away by using many lenses and glasses to bend the light in unusual ways. A telephoto lens is a camera lens with a longer focal length than normal, which means that your subject will look closer if you are photography from a distance.
A telephoto lens brings nearby and distant subjects closer at high magnification than the objective’s usual focal length allows. In the event of a format with a nearly constant proportion, such as the 35mm SLR, the Telephoto lens decreases the angle of vision, rendering what was formerly a close-up as a long shot.
Telephoto lenses are a type of lens that allows you to get up close and personal with a subject while yet maintaining some space between you and the subject. This is achieved by combining two pieces of glass in the same lens.
Telephoto lenses are classified as ‘complex’ lenses due to their large number of optical components. The 600mm f/4 Super Telephoto lens, which can be connected to a full-frame digital SLR like our Canon EOS 6D, is the largest telephoto lens for any camera.
Ultra-wide lenses
Ultra-wide lenses are ideal for shooting in tight quarters as well as capturing expansive landscapes. These lenses capture a vast scene and produce a “wide-angle” image, allowing you to fit more into the frame than ever before.
Ultra-wide lenses are ideal for photographers who seek unusual viewpoints. They can photograph vast landscapes, stunning architectural details, and bigger locations like interior gatherings and stage plays.
Whatever the occasion, ultra-wide lenses may help you capture some incredible images. Ultra-wide lenses are used to capture as much of the scene as possible, such as a road or a vista.
Ultra-wide-angle lenses have qualities that make them suitable for both architecture and landscape photography, and these lenses bring architecture and landscapes into sharp focus.
Ultra-wide-angle lenses, which have a focal length of 10mm or less and may generate a feeling of depth and perspective that is seldom seen in images shot with more normal lenses, are among the most sought-after types of lenses.
Furthermore, the ultra-wide aperture at the core of ultra-wide-angle models frequently allows for narrower depth of focus and handheld photography at shorter shutter speeds, making them excellent for low-light scenarios like sunset, where the sun is at a low angle relative to the horizon.
Fisheye lenses
A fisheye lens is a type of wide-angle lens that allows you to see a lot of the world. It’s ideal for capturing shots at night due of its large aperture, which allows in a lot of light. Ideal for keeping an eye out for vandalism in your area or snapping photographs outside at night. The fisheye lens is excellent for achieving an artistic, circular impression in photographs.
Fisheye lenses were originally created for visual surveillance, but they are now employed in a variety of different applications. The fisheye lens’s objective is to focus as much light as possible into a compact circle.
A fisheye lens is the polar opposite of a regular lens. Rather than producing a circular or elliptical image, it records everything inside its 180° field of view as an extreme panorama–that is, it does not make circular photographs but rather allows you to see a circular image on your camera’s sensor.
A fish-eye lens is a type of lens, typically an exceptionally wide-angle lens, that generates circular images with significant distortion, giving your photos a round appearance. It has the same field of vision as the human eye. A fisheye lens is a type of lens for single-lens reflex cameras that produces circular pictures with exceptionally broad projection angles ranging from 180° to 350°.
What does mm on a lens mean?
Millimeters are represented by the symbol “mm.” This measurement relates to how wide the lens can open up, allowing you to use the lens’s maximum capacity to focus or change its tightness to look near to the subject.
Wide-angle lenses capture more of a picture than macro lenses. The focal length of all camera lenses is measured in millimeters (mm). This number indicates how wide or long the lens will be able to shoot. It’s also widely used to identify zoom lenses, which alter their mm as they zoom in or out.
There are various lens diameters that numbers can represent, the most popular of which is 35mm, 50mm, and 85mm. Different lens sizes affect the angle at which your photographs may be captured.
A camera lens is optical equipment that gathers and focuses light to form a picture on the surface of a recording medium (film or digital sensor). The focal length, or focal distance, of a lens is the distance between the lens’s optical center (its geometric center) and the plane where the image is created.
Zoom lenses and fixed-focal-length lenses are the two most common types of camera lenses. A zoom lens is one whose focal length may be adjusted by turning a barrel holding several lens diameters within a single barrel.
A fixed-focal-length (or prime) lens has one focal length but can be manually focused. Variable focal lengths are used in several special-purpose lenses, with one sort of variable focal length being termed “interchangeable.”
A millimeter is a unit of measurement that specifies the size of an objective lens. A 75-300mm lens, for example, can be found on an SLR camera. The metric multiplier mm has nothing to do with focal length or angle of vision; it just indicates the physical size of a lens.
Conclusion
Many lens characteristics are bewildering while browsing for a camera lens on the Internet. When shopping, knowing the minimum and maximum focusing distances will come in handy. Some lenses feature greater-than-zero minimum focusing distances, allowing you to take closer photographs. Knowing the difference between mm and inches can help you determine which lens will best suit your photographic needs.
To comprehend the mm scale on a camera lens, (For example, if you see a lens labeled 50-200mm, this signifies that it is 50mm wide at its widest point and 200mm wide when zoomed in.) It is critical to comprehend its importance and how it operates.
It’s not about millimeters of quality or a number provided randomly by the manufacturer, but it’s simple to understand if you know what it means. In a nutshell, mm is an abbreviation for millimeters. When you see mm written on a lens or the side of a camera body, it refers to the distance measured between two fixed points on the lens.
