HOW TO Make The Most Of Your WIDE ANGLE Lens

The ultra wide angle lens. It's somewhat the workhorse for a lot of landscape photographers, myself included. However, this is a very specialised lens, whether it's 12-24mm, 16-35mm, 14-24mm, so on and so forth. These lenses are meant to be used in a very specific way, and from experience, I've just seen through teaching and running workshops, when people first start shooting with an ultra wide, they're really not taking advantage of it and using it accordingly. So in this video, let me give you some tips for using the ultra wide, how you can get the most out of this lens, and really give your landscape images a more three-dimensional look. And of course, I want to show you what not to do with this lens as well. Alright, let's take a look. First things first, when you put on a wide angle lens for the first time, I've seen this with teaching, people are a bit overwhelmed with the field of view, how expensive it is. And one of the things that you might struggle with is trying to really lead the eye to your subject matter, because you're now fitting so much within the frame. And the other thing that you might find is the pincushion effect. Because the glass is rounded, anything in that centralised part of your frame will get pressed further away, so everything will kind of converge in. If you're trying to make a mountain look large and impressive, if it's already quite far away, the wide angle is going to really press it off further into the distance as well. So people kind of struggle with these two things. Let me talk about how I think you should really use a wide angle lens. The benefit of the wide angle is exactly what I mentioned in point number one, because we can fit so much into the frame. Although that can be a weakness if you're not used to that, therein is its strength. It allows us to fit so much in. But how do we do justice to that? How do we make sure that the eye is going to effectively flow to a certain point? Well, one of the biggest and strongest privileges of having these lenses is that it now allows us to absolutely exaggerate what we call the diminishing perspective. This is our opportunity now to really give a three-dimensional feel to our images. And the diminishing perspective is where we are seeing a progression of large shapes getting smaller and smaller and basically rolling on into the distance. The wide angle lens is our tool to really emphasize that because we can get so close to our foreground, but still fit in a mid-ground and background. Why do we want to get close? Because of that diminishing perspective. When you get very, very close to the foreground, what it's going to do now is start to stretch out those details and really exaggerate the size and width of them. So for example, if you're standing in the middle of the road with a wide angle lens, you're really going to see the lower corners of the road come right through to out of your frame. And then naturally you're going to see that progress off into the distance. And those parallel lines are just going to get smaller and smaller. If you stand in the middle of the road at 35mm, you'll notice that the road at your foreground, the lines are almost the same distance apart there. You're not seeing that very dramatic progression of the lines getting in closer. Another way to really break it down is within nature, if you just get close to your foreground, maybe it's some stones, maybe it's a fern, you'll see that the very part getting close to the lens again is incredibly wide. It's large and it's detailed. And then very quickly you'll see that drop off and get smaller. So that's the diminishing perspective. That's where we're able to see now that size progression going from big to small. And that's how we pull the eye through the frame. That's how we give a three-dimensional feel and effect. One way you can completely ruin your opportunity to do that is by shooting with a wide angle lens and then just standing far back. If you're doing that, now you won't have that size progression. Everything will look a similar size as if it's all off in the midground, for example, and it flattens everything out. Start to get close to your subject matter. And when I say close, I'm talking within one foot of that foreground. So again, very common I've seen through teaching, people will get something in their foreground and it might be three feet from them. And that's still close for sure. But there is a dramatic difference of three feet to one foot to even six inches. Now, when we get that close, that's where you might have to focus stack and things can get a little bit more technical, but you'll be surprised and you'll see that three dimensionality compared to standing a few feet further back. So that is my number one tip for using the wide angle. The other tip that I want to talk about as well is adjust your angle. So if you're shooting everything front on the pin cushion, the problem that you're going to encounter, anything in that center zone now will just look tiny. If you just angle down slightly, you'll start to naturally use the warpage of the lens to lift back up whatever is in that centralized area. So if it's a tree, if it's a mountain dead center, it'll look very small, slide angle down, you will now see the pull up and you'll start to get a more realistic size to that subject. Now, if you go extreme angle, you will see it just gets incredibly warped. So it's a bit of common sense there, but if you are struggling with that pin cushion effect, give that a try, just angle down and you'll see that you start to bring it back and get a better shape. If you're struggling with isolating the subject matter, that's where that diminishing perspective can really help. If you come back too far, there's no natural flow. Now everything's just far off and there's lots going on. Get in very close, exaggerate some kind of foreground that was going to help flow and then the eye will just roll over that, roll over those large objects and then end up on that main subject. And my tip there is to put that main subject in that centralized part of the frame. It's very obvious then as we flow through where we're trying to end up, we don't really want to lead the eye to the edges because you're just going to lose the natural balance within the image. So ultra wide lenses, like I said, a very common tool for landscape photographers, but a somewhat specialized tool. And if you're just starting out with one of these, then it might be a little bit overwhelming and you might be thinking, why did I buy this? And I've just seen it firsthand, people put these on and then wonder why they have them. Get in very close, take advantage of the diminishing perspective and think about positioning that main subject matter towards that centralized part of the frame away from the edges. I hope you enjoyed this quick tip video. Please give it a thumbs up, leave any questions or comments below, that's always appreciated. And I hope to see you in another video soon.