rehess Loc: South Bend, Indiana, USA

Again we have a confusing thread, this time about "viewing prints". Rather than wade into that confusion, here are my thoughts on the matter. I basically agree with the contribution to that thread by "Photographer Jim" but my thoughts are more general - one's eyes should be far enough from the image to see the entire thing - this is entirely about the image, and has nothing to do with the taking of the image. In the days of film, I shot Kodachrome and I showed slides; my viewers sat roughly the same distance from the screen that I sat {with the projector}. If one followed the guidelines in that other thread, one would have to sit 250,000 miles away to look at a picture of the moon; obviously that would be dumb, but I believe it also would have been dumb to sit a foot away from the screen as I projected the image .... if I had wanted people to examine leaves on the trees, I would have filled several frames of pictures with leaves. Exactly the same principles apply to prints, recognizing that the prints are most likely smaller, so one would need to be somewhat closer.

BebuLamar

I agree!

John_F Loc: Minneapolis, MN

I have also seen the 3/2 x diagonal as 'best' image viewing distance and have been unable to find the technical basis for it. At first I though it to be associated with the eyes. Each eye's field of view is limited by the bridge of the nose, the brow bone, the temple bone, and the cheek bone. One can find data on those. Then the eyes are spaced ~4 inches which enables binocular vision. Next there is the central versus peripheral vision and this is where the facts search hits a brick wall. From simple trigonometry it is easy to get the viewing angle from the 3/2. That angle should relate to the eye's central vision, to my way of thinking.