There are different types of lens photography, each with its own characteristics. Ultra-wide angle lenses are very popular with landscape photographers. The main problem is that these lenses are very different from the way the world normally sees them. If you have not used an ultra-wide angle lens before, the first thing you will notice is their exaggerated view of the world.
Ultra-wide angle lenses are so wide that they allow you to bring the subject in an incredibly close way and put everything in your photo. An ultra-wide focal length lens produces images with a very wide viewing angle. They are lenses with a focal length of less than 24 mm for full-frame cameras.
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Ultra-wide angle lens photography
Spectacular view
Many photographers will say that you should not use an ultra-wide angle lens to fit everything in one photo. Sometimes, if you have an incredible scene that has a great view, the best way is to use ultra-wide angle lenses. Suppose you want to take a picture of your overhead clouds, the best way is to use ultra-wide lense. You can not achieve a beautiful image without using this lens.
Negative Space
Another way to use ultra-wide angle lense is to create a photo that has a lot of negative space. Ultra-wide angle lens do a good job of introducing negative space to your photo. Maybe you want to show the emptiness of the desert scene, then the negative space is exactly what you want.
Type of ultra-wide angle lenses
Ultra-wide lenses are classified into two categories:
- Fisheye Lenses
These lenses are known for their curved barrel deflection, which can cause image distortion and curvature of straight lines. Many Fisheye lenses are designed to capture a very wide viewing angle, usually exceeding 180 degrees.
- Rectilinear Lenses
linear lenses are designed to eliminate severe deflections. For this reason, the design of these lenses is much more complex than Fisheye lenses.
Who should use ultra-wide lens?
Ultra-wide lenses can be used by many photographers in a variety of genres, but they are certainly the most popular among architectural and landscape photographers. Architectural photographers use ultra-wide angle lenses to frame tall buildings. In particular, an ultra-wide angle lens can be really great for indoor photography.
Landscape photographers, also use ultra-wide-angle lenses to magnify the relative size of objects in the foreground.
Other photographers sometimes rely on ultra-wide lenses. For example, portrait photographers use ultra-wide-angle lenses to photograph people in tight spaces, ambient portrait photography, and photography of very large groups of people.
Why ultra-wide angle lens is highly recommended?
- They drag you into the scene
- They help you see directly
- They reverse the scale, by other words means They make things look very large or close to the lens, while distant objects look very small.
- They have a built-in panorama capability
How do ultra-wide lenses affect depth of field?
In photography, depth of field is affected by a number of different variables such as aperture, focal length, camera-to-subject distance, and sensor size. Undoubtedly, the focal length is one of the most important and effective factors that affect the depth of field. An ultra-wide angle lens has a very small focal length that allows for great depth of field, even when using relatively wide apertures.
Because ultra-wide angle lense can reach close-to-infinite distances, they are often used to show both background and foreground at the same time. In addition, the photographer no longer has to deal with light refraction issues at open apertures; after closing the focus distance, even narrower apertures such as f / 4 can cover a large distance from the subject to the background.
- As long as camera shake is largely related to the focal length used, the use of ultra-wide lenses allows photographers to capture their images at much slower shutter speed.
How to use ultra-wide lenses
One of the biggest mistakes many novice photographers make when using ultra-wide angle lenses is that they capture their images exactly as they did with a normal lens. This often leads to a lot of negative space with a lot of empty background.
The main subject of the scene as well as its surroundings seems insignificant at long distances because ultra-wide lens make the subject look very small. As ultra-wide lenses exaggerate the size of the foreground objects relative to the background, it is best to use them close to the main subject.
The main point is that you should highlight the subject and make it appear relatively larger than your surroundings or foreground. This makes ultra-wide lenses extremely functional, as photographers can select a small subject such as a stone or flower and make it appear much larger than anything else in the scene. In order to reduce the amount of space taken from the sky, the camera can be tilted down, which emphasizes the foreground.
What are the best ultra-wide lenses?
The number of ultra-wide lenses available today for different mounts is enormous, so it is virtually impossible to determine the best lenses. There are also different types of ultra-wide lenses with different optical designs and different focal lengths. Here are some of the best ultra-wide lenses suitable for different camera mounts:
- Nikon F: 14-24mm f / 2.8G and 16-35mm f / 4G ED VR
- Nikon Z: Z 14-30mm f / 4 S
- Canon EF: EF 11-24mm f / 4L USM and EF 16-35mm f / 2.8L III USM
- Sony FE: FE 12-24mm f / 4 G and FE 16-35mm f / 2.8 GM
- Fujifilm X: XF 8-16mm f / 2.8 R LM WR and XF 10-24mm f / 4 R OIS
Why ultra-wide lenses usually are too expensive?
Designing and manufacturing ultra-wide lenses is not an easy task. Many high-quality ultra-wide lenses have a sophisticated optical design that uses various spherical lens elements that are very expensive to manufacture.