Kultivate Arts

Kultivate Contributor Myra Wildmist is back with another SL Photography tutorial. This time she discusses how to use a 300 mm telephoto lens.

In real life, a telephoto lens is often used to in situations where it’s difficult to get close to your subject, such as sports photography or wildlife photo.

Getting close to your subject in Second Life, isn’t usually an issue. The likelihood of being mauled by a tiger in SL is fairly low.

That doesn’t mean a telephoto lens doesn’t have uses in SL. A telephoto lens still gives your photographs that zoomed-in-from-a-distance appearance, which yields an appealing, real-life effect, especially if your subject is an action scene or animals.

Settings for a 300mm lens

For my 300mm lens, I’m using the specifications from the Nikon AF-S NIKKOR 300mm. Open your Phototools (Alt-P). Select the DoF/Glow tab. Check the box by Enable Depth of Field (DoF). Use the following settings:

View angle – .143
FOV- 8.2 degrees
Foc Length – 300
f-number – 2.8-22 (Recommended range.)

View angle, FOV (Field of View) and Foc Length (Focal Length) are the important settings. These three settings “attach” the lens to your camera. Once they’re set, there’s no reason to adjust them, again, until you want to return to your default.

View angle is the the FOV expressed as radians.

The f-number controls the depth of field effect. Lower numbers yield more bokeh, blur.The range of 2.8-22 is a physical limitation of the real world lens. It’s just a recommended range in SL. If you want to mirror the effect you get with the Nikon lens, stay in this range; however, feel free to go outside of the f-number range if it fits your purposes.

WARNING: Do not fuss with View angle, FOV, or Foc Length, once you set them for a lens. These parameters are all dependent on each other and should correspond to the specs of the lens you want to use.

Settings for other popular lenses can be found in my previous article, Simulating Popular Lenses in Phototools.

Sample photos taken with a 300mm lens: