ASSIGNMENT 2

Landscape photography : wide angle lenses

Course detail:
Explore the creative options that wide-angle lenses provide in
landscape photography. This targeted group of photography tips
is for anyone who is interested in establishing greater depth,
shooting panoramas, shooting landscapes at night, or introducing
intentional distortion with wide-angle lenses. Justin Reznick
provides simple guidelines for more effective images, and helps
photographers find new uses for this great piece of gear.

CONTENTS

Introduction

 Welcome to wide angle landscape

 Approaches to wide angle landscape
 Overview of wide angle lens photography
 Creating a grand landscape image with a wide angle lens
 Creating images with a strong foreground using wide angle
lenses
 Creating a path for the eye by establishing depth
  Understanding how wide angle lenses distort
 Using a wide angle lens at night
 Shooting panoramas with a wide angle lens

Conclusion

 Next steps
 Hi, I'm Justin Reznick, and in this course we're going to dive into wide-
angle photography. Primarily using landscapes and architectural
work. What I'm gonna do is be able to share images and really explore
what
makes a wide-angle lens work. We're gonna deal with strong
foregrounds and backgrounds that have a relationship. And establishing
depth from front to back. We're gonna talk about photographing at night
.Night photography is amazing but it's really best with a wide-angle
lens. We're also going to do something really cool with tilt-shift wide-angle
lenses and how to do panoramas. And, finally, there's something called
distortion you get with a wide-angle lens. If you ever looked through one
you know where these lines converge. Well, when is a good time to do that
artistically? Now, the wide-angle lens is something that a lot of you may
have used before, or you could be new to it ,and it's exciting to see the
world in such a unique perspective and to take in this grand view. But it's so
crucial to follow some simple guidelines in order to make an effective
image. You don't want to include everything, you need to really learn to
simplify, even with such a large perspective. So what I'm really hoping is
that as you follow through these movies and look at examples illustrating
each one of these points that you can really take your wide-angle
photography to another level.
Overview of wide-angle lens photography

I'd like to provide a little bit of background on what a wide-

angle lens is. We're going to define it as anything that is as
wide as 10 millimeters moving up to 24 millimeters on a full-
frame camera. So a common wide-angle lens, let's say for a
Canon shooter, would be a 16 to 35. A Nikon shooter would be
14 to 24.And there's also crop-sensored bodies. So if you're
using, for example a Canon Rebel or you're using a Fuji XT1,
these cameras use crop sensors so often you'll see a 10 to 24 or
10 to 22. Even Micro Four Thirds users would use a seven to
14. So it's important to kind of define what wide angle means
to us. Now, throughout this chapter, we're going to
be doing image review and talking about composition and
strategies on how to use the lens. But we're not going in the
field. Now, if you want to get more in-depth on how to use the
lenses in the field, I really encourage you to check out my
courses. I do it in architectural work in Chicago, landscapes in
Olympic National Park, photographing a waterfall in New
Zealand. I use them all the time, I love them. So definitely check
those courses out but now what I want to do is get into
images and really talk about how to use a wide-angle
lens effectively by showing you images and illustrating how
they work.
Creating a grand landscape image with a wide-angle
lens

As a landscape photographer, I'll never forget the first time I

looked through a wide angle lens. It truly is an eye opening
experience. The world is most often viewed through 35 to 40
mil, that's how we see. And then all of the sudden you're at 16
millimeter and everything just opens up. And what often
happens with wide angle lenses and landscape
photographers, and I think this applies to architectural
photographers as well, is you get caught up in including all this
information, because you can't fathom how it all fits in this
lens. So, it's this incredibly unique and creative tool. But it
presents and interesting challenge. And that is one, a lot of
people are using it so your images tend to look like a lot of
other people's. Which is okay. But if your goal is originality it
becomes tough. And two, often times people include way too
much in their image. And one of the things I'm most critical
about when I'm critiquing my clients is, is it in or is it out? And
when you're shooting wide angle lenses you need to be very
careful.
Creating images with a strong foreground using wide-
angle lenses

I'm going to walk you through a typical exchange I have with a

client who's really trying to get better at shooting with a wide
angle lens. Say, "What could I be doing to improve this
shot?" And I'll say, "Get closer to the foreground" and I'll come
back a minute later and go, "Well now what?" and I'll say, "Get
closer to the foreground." And this happens four or five
times before they actually really get close. The beauty of a wide
angle lens is the way it accentuates and distorts the foreground
to make it so dominant in the frame and if you find a
foreground that's fascinating to be able to emphasize it in such
a way as to really dominate the image, is such a cool feature,
and it can only be done with a wide angle lens. So, I'm serious
about getting close. I mean, we're talking inches in certain
examples. Let's take a look at this, this is something where I call
Finger Falls, where the water is coming over the rock and these
beautiful fingers and my lens is literally four inches from
this and it's a relatively small little rapid.
Creating a path for the eye by establishing depth

Now we've discussed the idea of having a grand landscape and

a strong foreground. And that foreground needs to have a
relationship with the backgrounds so you complement each
other and have something visually interesting. Now what I want
to discuss in this movie is establishing depth And what I mean
by that is, in order for us to have a relationship between the
foreground and background, usually there's some sort of path
or line or visual cue for us to travel from one to the next. And
with a wide angle lens, it ends up pushing everything apart and
it makes the scene appear further than it really is. When I'm
using a telephoto lens I'm looking for compression. I'm taking
everything and kind of pushing it together. With wide angle,
we're spreading it apart. And it's very important to have a
strong path. So we're going to start by looking at this image
taken in the Columbia River Gorge. And we have kind of a dual
foreground, I've got some beautiful green ferns with fresh rain
on top and then the nice rapids here.
Understanding how wide-angle lenses distort

Wide-angle lenses have a very interesting effect on straight

lines. What they end up doing, vertical lines, is they
converge, and you completely change the angle of those lines.
And this can be a negative. For example if you're doing
architectural work and you're trying to make a realistic
interpretation of the building, and that's why tilt-shift
lenses have become very important for that. But what if you're
goal is to embrace the convergence and make an artistic
image? And this is a prime example. This is my favorite way to
illustrate this point, is go into any forest and look straight
up, and you're going to see what you'd imagine. You're going
to see trees looking up, and the sky behind it. Now take out
your camera, put your wide-angle lens on, go as wide as you
can, and then point it up at the sky, and all those straight
trees will converge into one single point. This was taken in
Colorado at the peak of fall color, and you're looking at aspens,
and straight up. And look at all of them converge into this one
point.
Using a wide-angle lens at night

Wide angle lenses are the preferred lens for shooting night
photography, and the number one reason why is called the 500
rule. Let me explain what that is. The stars are moving at
night, and any long exposure an pick up star trails, and so the
key is how can we make an exposure which really makes the
stars appear static, which is naturally how we view the stars. So
we have to figure this out, and the way to do it is to take the
number 500 and divide it by your focal length. Let's say you
have a 24 millimeter lens, which is a wide angle lens. It's on the
longer side of wide, but it's still wide. 500 divided by 24 gives
you a 21-second exposure. If you go wider, let's say 16
mil, you're around 30 seconds. 14 mil, you're around 35
seconds. So you can see the wider you are, the longer the
exposure can be. So if I'm all of a sudden shooting at 50
millimeters, then I'm down to 10 seconds, and the reality is it's
so dark out, and we need to get as much light to hit our sensor
as possible that we want to be able to have that extra shutter
speed time.
Shooting panoramas with a wide-angle lens

When we think of wide angle lenses, in general, the 16 to 35

range, 14 to 24, those are the lenses we tend to think
about. We tend to gravitate towards zoom lenses. There's some
nice primes in the 21 millimeter,14 millimeter but there's
another kind of wide angle lens and something that I like to
do, I want to share with you. You don't see this very often. And
that's the tilt shift prime lens. And what you can do with it is
create amazing wide angle panoramas. Now the closer the
subject is to the lens, the more difficult it is to create a
panorama and have those images stitch seamlessly and
post. And there's quite a bit of equipment and a steep learning
curve if you want to make a wide-angle pano. But not with the
tilt shift lens. It's so simple to make these panoramas. And I
demonstrate that technique in my tilt shift course as well as my
Olympic National Park Course. And we're going to look at an
image here from the Columbia River Gorge where I basically
look at it from a wide angle perspective and I ask myself a
simple question.
Next steps

It's very common that the first lens that a landscape or

architectural photographer gets to play with that really blows
their mind is a wide-angle lens, and I totally agree The first
time I looked through one, I couldn't believe it. But the key is
that we don't want to just point at the world and see everything
at wide-angle and snap away. There are some
real strategies and tools we want to embrace, and I'm
hoping that throughout this course you're able to really focus
on those things, like picking a very strong foreground, having a
relationship between the foreground and the background, and
really establishing depth and a clear path throughout. I really
want you to think about what's in the frame. Is everything in
there necessary? Does this grand landscape work? Is there
something in there distracting? Maybe I need to use a different
lens. So the wide-angle lens, on the one hand, is this see-all,
amazing perspective lens. On the other hand, it's something
that takes skill to use properly. You're also going to get things
like distortion,