Wide-Angle vs Standard lens

[Siggi]

Hi!
I'm pretty new to photography and while I was doing some research on Lenses, I came across the term Wide-Angle lens. Is there a difference to normal lenses, the ones you get when you buy a new DSLR Camera? If so, can you explain the deifference? What effect does it have on the photos I make?

Tanks alot!
Cheers,
Siggi

[OsmosisStudios]

Wide angle lenses have a shorter focal length, show more of a scene at once, and exaggerate the distances between objects in the depth plane. Normal lenses are mid-range focal lengths.

"Wide" is generally considered to be lenses with a 35mm equivalent focal length of 28mm or less
"Normal" is generally considered to be lenses with a 35mm equivalent of 29mm to 60mm or so. It varies a lot more.

For example:

The image on the left is at 10mm, taken from a few feet from the lighthouse.
The image on the right is at 24mm, taken several yards from the lighthouse.

in 35mm equivalency terms, that's 15mm and 36mm, so very wide and sorta normal.

Another example:

This is at 50mm on a crop-sensor camera. It's a 75mm equivalent (though the perspective is still that of a 50mm lens).

As you can see, the wider you go, the more cool crazy distortion you get. This CAN be used to effect for landscapes, but is generally frowned upon for portraits (although it can still be fun). An example can be found here (slghtly NSFW).

Hope that clears things up a bit.

[jdepould]

Normal-ish:


Wide-angle:




See the difference?

A lot of it is down to distortion and perspective. You can achieve roughly the same framing with a longer lens by moving back, but the end result will still look different. Wide angle lenses exaggerate distance between objects, longer lenses flatten stuff out more.