Tip of the month: September 2022. Getting more from your Wide-Angle lens.
A wide-angle lens is one that has a focal length shorter than a standard lens. On a full-frame camera, that means shorter than 50mm. On most crop sensor cameras it’s shorter than 35mm and on a micro four-thirds camera like mine, it’s shorter than 25mm. The smaller that number gets, the wider you lens becomes. No matter what sort of camera you use, there are a few things that all wide-angle lenses have in common in terms of what they offer your photography.
- By offering a wide angle of view, they can ‘fit more in.’ Consequently, objects appear smaller and more distant than they really are.
- Wide angle lenses create a stronger depth of field than standard or telephoto lenses. So not only can you fit more in, you can keep more of it sharp.
- Wide angle lenses exaggerate perspective, making objects at different distances seem further apart than they really are.
It’s that third point – exaggerated perspective – that I want to take a closer look at for this tip. It’s really a consequence of point one and two. If the wide-angle lens makes things appear smaller, then you can get very close to a big object and still fit it in the shot. Meanwhile objects in the distance will still appear much further away. This can result in a photo that gives much greater prominence to the foreground object – simply because you can make it appear very large, while making everything in the distance smaller.
The extra depth of field means that you can also keep both foreground and background relatively sharp. So viewers can see detail in both the foreground and background, but the eye will always be drawn to the foreground first due to that exaggerated prominence. So as a creative photographer you can effectively tell the viewer where to start…and then lead them where you want them to go.
Taking that idea further, if you can introduce a leading line (curved or diagonal lines work really well) you can really add to the three-dimensional quality of your photo. Think of it like a story. Your eye-catching foreground grabs the viewer’s attention, the lines lead you through the storyline, and the background feature becomes the full-stop at the end of the sentence.
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