Lenses #4 - Wide angle.

[RichardTaylor]

Lenses #4 - Wide angle.

As mentioned in part one of this series wide angle lenses are great for "getting it all in.
They usualy range from 10/12-22/24mm for a crop camera. Which is ultrawide to wide angle.
For a full frame camera they will start around 17mm (for an ultrawide) or 28mm for a wide angle.

What are they good for:

(1) When you are working close you don't always have a lot of working room.
Here using a very wild angle lens (12mm on a 1.6 crop camera (or ~18mm on a full frame Camera)) I have been able to include part of the opera house and its setting.

Camera Canon EOS 40D
Exposure 15
Aperture f/14.0
Focal Length 12 mm
ISO Speed 400
Exposure Bias 0 EV

(2) This in a train compartment so space is really tight however an ultra wide lens really helps.

Camera Canon EOS 40D
Exposure 0.05 sec (1/20)
Aperture f/16.0
Focal Length 12 mm
ISO Speed 1600
Exposure Bias 0 EV
Flash On, Fired

(3) Wide angle lenses are great for "envronmental portraits", ie where you show a person as part of their surroundings. The wide angle lens helps to capture a lot of the scene. Here is an example.

Pic taken with a 1.6 crop camera and a Tokina 12-24 lens.
Exif data is not available.

(4) One thing you can control when shooting is the appearance of the scene in the image, it is called called perspective and it is controlled by the point of view (POV) and shooting distance. Because you can fill the frame with your subject from relatively close shooting distances, compared to normal or telephoto lenses, you do have a lot of control over perspective.
Also it is very easy to achieve great depth of field (zone of sharpness),
which is another advantage of a wide angle lens.

Camera Canon EOS 40D
Exposure 0.025 sec (1/40)
Aperture f/9.0
Focal Length 12 mm
ISO Speed 800
Exposure Bias 0 EV
Flash Off, Did not fire

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Lenses #1 - Introduction to DSLR lenses.
Lenses #1 - Introduction to DSLR lenses.

Zooms & primes.
For a good introduction to zoom and prime lenses see this post (on this site).
http://www.digital-photography-schoo...which-are-best

(2) "Standard" zooms -
Lenses #2 - Standard lenses

(3) Superzooms:
Lenses #3 - Superzooms.

(5) Wide angle zooms. This post

(6) Telephoto -
Lenses #5 - Telephoto

(7) Fast lenses
Lenses #6 - Fast lenses
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Thanks for looking.
Feel free to ask questions and feedback would be appreciated.

Richard