Page Comparison

The Maxwell Render camera is designed to work like a real camera so it is important to understand some photographic concepts. The most important concept to understand is the Depth of Field (the depth of the area in the render that will be in focus) and the settings that affect it. In a real camera, the depth of field is determined by the focal length and aperture of the lens, the size of the film or digital sensor and the distance of the camera to the object.

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This is called a "full stop" F-stop scale, meaning each increase in the F-stop halves the amount of light reaching the film. Most lenses also have intermediate F-stops, such as 1.2, 1.8, 3.2, 7.1 etc. The Maxwell Camera allows you to change the F-stop to any value you like, for example 3.21 which wouldn't exist in a real lens. It also allows you to set very high F-stop numbers such as 100. It is generally recommended though to use a real lenses range of aperture to have more predictable real life responses to DOF, exposure, and light intensity.

The Depth of Field tool below should help you visualize the changes to the DOF that F-stop creates. Drag your mouse up/down to change the Focal Distance, drag left/right to change the F-stop.

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Comparing two extremes, a very wide angle lens (15mm) and a "telephoto" lens (500mm):

In the above examples, the camera with the wide angle lens setting was moved very close to the first Zippo and you can see that it still captures all the Zippos because of the extremely wide FOV. Notice also the perspective distortion that happens with such a wide angle lens - the objects seem more "stretched" and distorted, as when looking through a peephole. Also the distance between each Zippo becomes exaggerated. In contrast, the telephoto lens squashes, or flattens the perpective, it becomes difficult to tell exactly how far apart each Zippo is.

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