Using wide-angle lenses to exaggerate space and distance.
Wide-angle Lenses
The Beauty of Using Wide-angle Lense to Exaggerate Space
When it comes to photographing landscapes one of the first decisions you have to make is choosing the right lens. The focal length of a lens can have a profound affect on how a scene is interpreted. Does your photograph represent a true reflection of the spaces and sizes in the landscape? Do you want to compress the spaces? Exaggerate them?
Very often in a landscape what you want to do is exaggerate or expand space to make the scene look as vast and dramatic in a photograph as it appeared to you in person. Enter the wide-angle lens. Wide-angle lenses have a wider field of
view which creates the illusion of greater distance because they make
everything in the frame appear smaller. The farther something is from
the lens, the smaller it appears. Also, the wider the lens the more
exaggerated space becomes.
Wide-angle lenses are particularly
useful when you want to expand space in a landscape photograph. In this
street scene taken in the wonderful little town of Prairie City, Iowa,
for example, I used an 18mm lens (27mm on my Nikon D70s with the
cropping factor) to exaggerate the feeling of distance of this small
road. I also used a small aperture (f/22) to keep everything in sharp
focus from near to far--which adds to the illusion of distance. One
more trick I used to heighten the depth illusion in this photo was to
use the power of one-point perspective--letting the road converge to a
vanishing point.
What constitutes a wide-angle lens? In basic terms anything wider than
a "normal" lens (roughly 50mm in 35mm format, for example) is
considered wide angle. The most useful lenses are those that have a
35mm equivalent focal length of between 21mm and 28mm (again, we have
to talk in 35mm equivalents because different sensor sizes make the
actual focal lengths irrelevant in general terms). There are wider
lenses--up to about 10mm--but these begin to fall into the range of
"fisheye" lenses, or extremely wide-angle lenses used only for special
effects. (And since I have a fisheye lens on order, I'll write more
about them very soon!)
Get to know how all of your zoom lens
settings or different DSLR lenses transform various scenes and you'll
always know which lens to turn to for a specific effect.
This rural Iowa scene was photographed using an 18mm Nikkor lens (about 28mm in 35mm equivalent) on a Nikon D70s body. By using a wide angle lens from an elevated position (standing on a small hill), I was able to exaggerate the great distance of the scene. Notice that I also used a very small aperture (f/22) to keep everything crystal sharp.
I used a wide-angle lens to exaggerate the length of (as if it needed it!) this yacht in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
