Do you NEED an ULTRA WIDE angle LENS?

What are the pros and cons of an ultra-wide angle lens? In this video I talk about how to best use a 14-24mm or 16-35mm lens.

NIKON GEAR (Main STILLS camera)

FILM GEAR

OTHER PHOTO GEAR

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[d]

Nigel, there is a beautiful sense of calmness in your personality. That reflects in your photography as well. I watch your videos both to feel at ease and to enjoy your beautiful photos. Keep up your good work,

[chrisd]

This video delivered a big "Ah ha" moment for me and explains why I have been generally disappointed with the results from my 10-18mm APS-C wide angle lens. It has also got me thinking about taking the plunge and buying a 12-24mm for my full frame camera. You have been so helpful. Thank you so much!

[shadow]

I am in pure love with your photo at 5:40, , , I just stopped hearing you imagining myself trying to accomplish the same.

[jpdj]

Nice video and photography. When this question pops up, I always point to the possibility of panorama shots and stitching. There are two requirements. (1) if you want easy stitching you need a nodal slide and tripod head that can be panned after it was leveled. It is tempting to think in terms of 3D panorama kit, but that is seriously expensive. And you need to figure out where the nodal point is of your lens you want to use in the panorama. (2) Movement in the subject can make stitching difficult: grass, clouds, water, stars maybe, people. Some of this can be dealt with by Photoshop with or without your help (PS is incredibly awesome at stitching).

Take, for example, the shot at 1:14 taken with a 14mm lens. That 14mm has a vertical angle of 81 degrees and horizontal of 104 degrees. If we put a 20mm on the same camera/sensor (full frame) and set the camera to "portrait" orientation, we get a vertical angle of 84 degrees, which is already more than the 14mm lens had vertically, in its landscape orientation. But the 20 mm now has a horizontal angle of 62 degrees, so to cover the 104 degrees of the 14 we need at least two shots. With more overlap, stitching may be a bit easier (depending on the program we use) and in that case we need three shots. But now we have taken two shots for the 104 degrees, we could equally well add more landscape horizontally for a letterbox format.

Mental and other hurdles aside, we now have significantly more megapixels in the resulting shot. Printing to large format needs less upscaling/upsampling.

Once we figured this out, we can do this with other lenses too. People shooting very wide angles need to go through a lot of practice to learn composition again, for instance to learn to avoid uninteresting foregrounds, Nigel points to this too in the video. Panorama shots and letterbox format need learning too, but can easily avoid uninteresting foregrounds that you would crop away in your early composition learning process (thus loosing pixels resolution).
If you have a nifty fifty and its horizontal in landscape angle of 39 degrees would be enough for vertical use, then you can still get to the 104 degrees angle of the 14mm lens here: with 27 degrees angle available and 1/3 overlap you need about 6 shots to get at or over that 104 degrees.

That nifty fifty panorama of 6 shots, using 2/3rd of your 45.7 megapixel sensor, thus, will give you about 180 megapixel of panorama picture. Take the same shot with the 14mm and crop 1/3rd away to remove some foreground and sky, and you end up with 30 megapixels. I know that 24 megapixels can do a lot. And am acutely aware that 100 megapixels have only twice the linear resolution of 25 megapixels. But if you are into hyper-realism, with beautiful gradation of very soft tones, potentially cloudy or foggy parts with very sharp parts where details are actually present, then you will enjoy this approach.

If you use that same nifty fifty in architecture and have a 3D nodal panorama kit, you can get to the 14mm shot's angle of view in three rows of 6 shots (in portrait orientation) where the middle row primarily functions to give lots of overlap.

Note that the angle of a lens in brochures or similar web publications is generally the diagonal angle. Lens angle is specified for distance setting at infinity and directly relates to your image format: sensor size as used in the shots.
If you want to calculate the angle for any focal lens and any image format (at infinity), the MS-Excel formula (or Google Sheets) is

where B$29 references the used sensor dimension (horizontal 35.9 in my case) and C29 holds vertical format plus D29 the diagonal. The cells only contain the number, not the units. You have to keep the units in all the cells the same, yourself.
$F29 is the focal length for which the angle is calculated - all my length units are in millimeters.
The dollar-signs give absolute references so a formula uses the same row/column/cell when you drag a formula to another row or column, depending on what you put the dollar-sign to.

For reference, to get a horizontal angle of 90 degrees with a 35.9mm sensor, you need 17.8mm.
If your camera has 36mm of sensor available to you, this becomes 17.9mm.

[amirhkh]

I think Nigel is my brother and help me to do perfectly. He always explains everything precisely to save details. Details are always important because important parts are always in detail.

[davidcohn]

Excellent presentation, especially hearing your thought process illustrated with photo examples.

[AWAL]

I do love the almost dynamically moving look proper wide angle gives

[simonetognolo]

Great explanation Nigel, I love the way you make every detail of photography personal, talking about how you feel or what you do while taking the shots that you show (amazing as always!), it helps people understanding that photography is more than just a hobby or a job, it's a choice, a personal and unique lifestyle, that can and will definitely change your life forever. There's a great component of photography that many people don't get: emotions, both in the shots and in the moment when the photo was taken, it's those feelings that make each and every shot unique, a piece of our story. (Sorry if I made some mistakes, I'm not English).

[streetowski]

Best wide angle photography I’ve seen so far in a YT video. Hats off 👌

[fritz]

Thank you very much. Your little compressed presentation helps me along.

[inrain]

This was a really helpful video. Not so much concentrating on the gear but much more on how to position stuff in your image. Thanks very much.

[dfinlay]

My first UWA was a 10-20 (APS-C). Last week I got the 14-30 and have yet to fire it in anger. I find the UWA especially useful for travel photography. Especially in the tight streets of Europe. You can pack a lot into the frame when needed. You are right about the edges, people sometimes look like they have been squished. Thanks Nigel.

[davidcurrie]

Brilliant video as always. I love the way that you share your knowledge, it is so helpful and your images are awe inspiring. Thanks Nigel and Pebbles.

[elijahmant]

Hey, Nigel. Most informative and interesting. Thanks for sharing your knowledge.

[rasmuschristiansen]

I traveled to Norway with a 16-35 F4 and got some very satisfying images, but I felt like I was missing the ability to go into the mid-focal lengths. So I bought a 24-70 F4 in its place, which I feel more at home with. Now I just have a prime 14mm F2.8, that I can use if I ever need to go really wide. It's also a better option for astrophotography.

[MultiMegman]

Thank you for the composition tips on how to shoot at 14mm!

[maxencelemoine]

I always struggle with wide angle lenses. I can't find the balance between the foreground and the subject. Sometimes I even focus too much on a strong foreground and forget the rest of the image.

[tjsinva]

Another good lesson with those great images! The U.S. dawn patrol returns with the resumption of standard time, thus raising havoc with my equilibrium and body clock for awhile. 🙃 Pebbles!! 🐶😊 Rock on!

[jgreenler]

Thanks, Nigel. These are great considerations. I think you've also mentioned in other videos to be aware of losing your subject when shooting wide. Often we get so taken with the grandeur of a sweeping landscape that we reach for our wide-angle to capture it all. As a result, we sometimes lose the impact of our story that could be more powerfully told with a telephoto lens.

[markbradshaw]

As a lover of Sigma 10-20 and currently Nikon 16-35 you talk sense here and back it up with some nice work.