6 Use a wideangle lens to play with perspective

Still-life photography isn’t all about zooming in with macro lenses – try a different approach with a wide-angle optic

You can have some great fun raiding your kitchen drawers and taking experimental pictures of various culinary gadgets and gizmos. In this step-by-step guide, we’ll show you how to take amazing close-ups of a box cheese grater: once you’ve tried it out, you could give it a go on other items around your house, too. The key is to use a wide-angle lens to really show off the incredible detail that lies inside your subject.

We used a 16-35mm lens, although the wide end of a kit zoom lens like an 18-55mm or even a fisheye lens would also work well. Here’s how you can do it…

PRO SHOT Box grater

Our 16mm ultra-wide-angle lens reveals the incredible detail on the inside of this box grater – it almost looks like a scene from a science fiction film! The crisp reflections work well to bounce around the flash light, and the dark background adds loads of contrast.

PRO ADVICE Wide-angle lens

50mm is considered a ‘standard’ lens because it’s roughly what the human eye can see. Anything longer, like 200mm, is a telephoto; and anything wider, like 16mm, is a wide-angle. We used the 16mm end of a 16-35mm lens to go super-wide and squeeze in maximum detail from this box grater scene.

Using the camera grid: on our Canon EOS 6D Mark II, we used the 3 x 3 grid display with diagonals enabled so that we could perfectly line up the diagonal lines of the box grater, for a perfectly geometrical shot.