Do the numbers on a camera lenses mean anything if I want a camera that..?
I can take pictures with close to me but it appears farther away? If that makes sense. Like if i take pictures of myself i can usually only get my face, but I want to get more then just my face?
Yes, you need a camera with a very short focal length.
The camera lens usually is marked with it’s focal length or range of focal length for zoom lenses and the max aperture, or again, range of apertures for zoom… Something like 18-55mm f/4.0-5.6
That means it can zoom from 18mm to 55mm and at 15mm would have maximum opening of f/4.0 and at 55mm it would be f/5.6… The opening is not important for what you are asking though. The short end of focal length is. That’s the number in place of “18″ in my example…
The focal length of a lens determined how far the light travels from the point of entering the lens and until it hits the focal plane (or sensor). The shorter this distance is, the wider an angle it will capture. This is called wide angle. The longer focal lengths will capture subjects at very narrow angles, allowing them to be brought really “close”.
What you need is something like 15 to 20mm in 35mm film equivalent. For digital cameras that means a lot less than that, because most digital cameras have sensors smaller than film. In SLR camera that usually means about 10 or 15mm. In Point and shoot due to the very tiny sensor it means more like 3mm to 4mm focal length…
Now a bit of bad news - I don’t think any point & shoot camera comes even close to this kind of super-wide angle (because if you make your lens 3mm long - where would you put the glass???). So you need one of two things for that:
1. An SLR with super wide lens (a lot of $$$ - at least $700-800 for the cheapest appropriate kit - those super wide lenses are expensive).
2. A point and shoot + wide angle conversion lens.
The second option is tricky. The best wide angle you can get on most point and shoot cameras is about 27mm equivalent. So to turn it into super wide you’ll need at least 0.5x or 0.4x conversion lens. Again, most original camera manufacturers will only go for about 0.8x or 0.7x on those, but you can get a third-party one. The bad news is that third party converters are usually of very questionable quality. So you’ll have to trade off there…
And of course you can expect to see lots of distortions if you want to shoot yourself from the distance of extended hand using this super wide angle lens! Maybe even fisheye effect like this:
http://lapin-bleu.net/riviera/wp-content…
(That’s a special lens called fisheye - it gets the widest of all possible shots, but distorts them in a circle. Sort of like the fish sees the world around it. Hence the name.