Wide-angle lenses
A wide-angle lens doesn’t just mean capturing the wider view, learn how to use them to add some extra impact to your landscapes
Awider lens is perfect, especially if you are struggling to capture the expanse of a stunning vista with your standard zoom. But, without adjusting your shooting technique, this wider view can mean that everything looks very small in the frame, and your images lack the impact that you want. The answer to this problem is quite simply composition and viewpoint.
These are important when using any lens, but they are critical to getting the best results from wide-angle lenses. A great way to help with this is to think about the three main areas of the frame, the background, middle ground and foreground in three simple steps. First identify the elements in the background that you want to include and choose your focal length so that these fit the frame from left to right. Then look for your foreground elements. This can be almost anything with sufficient interest, texture or detail to capture the attention of the viewer, such as rocks, patterns in sand or colourful foliage. Then find a viewpoint where you can include these two main elements without having any large empty areas or significant obstructions in the middle ground. This can be a particular problem when shooting seascapes, big rivers or lakes, where the large area of water can cause a ‘barrier’ between the foreground and the background. One solution to this is to use a low viewpoint, which will reduce the area of water that’s visible, and produce a more balanced result. For this final step you can also look for elements such as lead-in lines, or an arrangement of objects that lead the viewer from the foreground to the background, to add interest to the composition.
When choosing your composition with an ultra-wide lens, don’t be afraid of getting very close to the foreground to make it really dominate the frame, especially if you are shooting in overcast conditions. Using this technique you will need to shoot at a narrow aperture, such as f/16 or even f/22, and focus a few metres into the scene to ensure that the image is sharp from front to back.
There are another class of wide-angle lens at the extremely short end of the focal length spectrum; the fisheye. Unlike normal wide-angle lenses, these optics are
designed to produce distorted results. There are two main types of fisheye lens, those that produce a normal rectangular image, known as diagonal fisheye, and those that produce a round image within the normal frame, known as circular fisheye. The distorted results mean that fisheye lenses are an acquired taste, and they aren’t suitable for every landscape, but they can produce quite striking results.