Les Jones

Photos > Something New to Me About Wide-angle Lenses

Thom Hogan:

Since I haven't written about this before, let me give you a feel for what I think about "wide angle":

	FX (35mm)	DX
Very wide angle	<20mm	<13mm
Wide angle	20-28mm	13-18mm
Modestly wide	>28mm	>18mm

Most newcomers to wide angle lenses think that the primary thing that distinguishes them is their angle of view: a wider lens gives you a wider angle of view on a scene. Yes, you can see more "width" through the viewfinder, but that's actually not the real reason why pros tend to gravitate towards "very wide angle" lenses instead of "modestly wide" ones. The real issue is depth. The wider angle of view allows you to move closer to the nearest subject, which gives you an exaggerated depth in your final image (my workshop students are all chanting: near, middle, far). If you think back to the classic landscape shots, they all tend to have dramatic depth to them, not side-to-side width. Remember, you're going to take a three-dimensional space (reality) and capture it in two dimensions that you're going to print in two dimensions and then display on a two-dimensional surface. Depth is so much more important to a photograph working than angle of view because of that. "Very wide angle" lenses allow you to push depth cues, while "modestly wide" lenses don't.

By exaggerated depth I think he's talking about the kind of pictures where the subject is very close to the camera and the background has the illusion of quickly receding into the faraway distance. I didn't realize how that was done.