The Allure of Wide-angle Lenses

Beginners to photography and SLRs are ususlly interested in how much zoom or telephoto power their camera or lens has. Usually the first add-on lens a new person buys is a long zoom. I often wonder why this is. What about the other end of the spectrum –wide-angle lenses.

Newbies often ask- Do you like faces that appear to have noses the size of grapefruits? Do you really like the weird perspective?

The answer is that extreme wide angle (which I’d say is less than 24mm in full-frame format) is simply a fun option. Unlike telephoto lenses, which give the illusion of compressing space but do little to change the way a scene is viewed, extreme wide angle lenses offer a view of a scene that is totally foreign to our typical perception. That’s exciting. It’s also challenging. Using the 16mm end of a zoom lens on a DSLR body is rough work compositionally. But the separation that one can acheive between foreground and background elements, once accustomed to such compositions, is something that can only be done in photography.

And if you can do so wide open and get the background to go soft too… well, that’s even better. And that isn’t possible (yet) with current equipment on smaller-sensor bodies.

Tamron SP Autofocus 11-18mm f/4.5-5.6 Di II LD Aspherical (IF) Lens for Canon Digital SLR Cameras