What Should You Photograph With A Wide-Angle Lens?

As you may know from my previous posts or my FAQ page, I have seven lenses. Today I am going to write about the wide-angle lens and after this post throughout a long period of time, I am hoping to do a series of these for each of my lenses.

There is no right or wrong answer as to what to use a lens for its all about your own self-expression but here I am going to tell you what I use it for.

When I thought about buying the Sigma 10-20mm I wanted to have a better landscape lens as before this I only had the 18-55mm kit lens and the 55-200mm telephoto zoom lens which didn’t provide me with the depth of field I wanted for my landscapes.

So, what is a wide-angle lens? A wide-angle lens is any lens that can view more than the human eye sees. Wide-angle lenses distort the subject and enhance perspective. This means whatever is in front of the frame will appear larger than anything that is further away.

I soon realised that you can also create creative portraits with a wide-angle lens. In my opinion, by positioning yourself at a lower angle than your subject you open up your surroundings to a whole new point of view.

In architectural shots, you want to use this lens to capture the entirety of a building so you can see all the detail and not just glimpses of it.

In one of my university projects during my master’s I used the wide-angle lens to take images I wanted to create a perspective where I had the full person and aspects of a building behind to convey the way in which we use public spaces to this day.

A great use I’d say is these lenses are great for events as they allow you to photograph much larger groups of people.

The final thing I have used this lens for is when I photograph fencing charity events. The reason is that I want to get every one of the participants in the frame which I can’t do with a zoom lens maybe I’d need a zoom lens in a larger venue where I need to be further away from the action.

I feel the wide-angle lens provides you with new perspectives that you didn’t even consider before. You can see a lot more with a wide-angle lens than a fixed perspective. Below is a gallery of some of my work using this lens: