Choosing Lenses for Small Spaces

Wide vs Normal in Tight Labs and Studios

When you’re filming or photographing in small labs, classrooms, or home studios, lens choice matters far more than people expect. You can’t always “just step back”, and the wrong lens can make benches bend, faces stretch, and experiments look… odd.

So should you go wide to fit everything in, or stick with a more normal focal length and accept tighter framing?

Let’s break it down.

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What Do We Mean by “Wide” and “Normal”?

On a full-frame camera (or equivalent):

• Wide: ~16–24 mm

• Normal: ~35–50 mm

On APS-C bodies, think roughly:

• Wide: 10–18 mm

• Normal: 23–35 mm

Both have their place — but they behave very differently in small spaces.

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Wide Lenses in Tight Spaces – The Good and the Bad

✅ Advantages

• You can actually fit the room in
  Benches, apparatus, whiteboards, and hands-on demonstrations all in one frame.

• Great for context
  Perfect for showing how an experiment sits in the lab.

• Forgiving for movement
  Ideal when you’re moving between kit, camera, and whiteboard.

⚠️ Disadvantages

• Perspective distortion
  Get too close and faces stretch, hands balloon, and beakers lean.

• Edges lie
  Straight lab benches become curves near the frame edge.

• Temptation to get lazy
  Wide lenses forgive bad positioning… but viewers notice subconsciously.

💡 Tip: Keep faces near the centre of frame and avoid putting key kit right on the edges.

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Normal Lenses – Calm, Clear, and Flattering

✅ Advantages

• Natural perspective
  What you see is what the camera sees.

• Flattering for people
  Essential for talking-head explanations and interviews.

• Cleaner backgrounds
  Less visual clutter from the room.

⚠️ Disadvantages

• You need space
  In a small lab, you may hit a wall — literally.

• Harder to show full setups
  Big rigs and long benches may not fit.

💡 Tip: Normal lenses shine when you break filming into sections: wide for context, normal for explanation.

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A Practical Workflow for Small Labs & Studios

This is what works reliably in tight educational spaces:

1. Wide lens (16–24 mm FF / 10–16 mm APS-C)

   • Establishing shots

   • Full experiment setup

   • Overhead or side-on demonstrations

2. Normal lens (35–50 mm FF / 23–35 mm APS-C)

   • Explaining concepts

   • Talking to camera

   • Close-ups of reactions, readings, or hands

3. Move the camera, not just the zoom
   Perspective changes with distance, not focal length.

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Common Mistakes to Avoid

• Standing too close with a wide lens

• Filming faces at the edge of a wide frame

• Using a normal lens and cropping everything in post

• Forgetting that lens choice affects how trustworthy visuals feel in education

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Final Thought

In small labs and studios, wide lenses solve space problems — but normal lenses solve communication problems.

The best results come from using both deliberately, not picking one and hoping for the best.