So the first genre of photos where wide angle can be ‘cool’ is pretty well known: Portraits!

Sigma 10-20mm @10mm

These portraits are of course not the ones you will make of a CEO. But among friends these are pretty awesome. Animal portraits work also well.

Sigma 10-20mm @10mm

Lets be honest. You wont be making this kind portraits all the time. The next use of wide angle is one which is more common for me. Churches. Churches are usually high and long, which makes it very difficult to get them in 1 frame. I love 10mm for the great FOV it gives me.

Sigma 10-20mm @ 10mm

This amazing church could have never given this result without wide angle. The great thing about 10mm is the FOV gets wider, so the church looks much longer. Gives a great perspective.

Another example:

Sigma 10-20mm @10mm

Warning! When making pictures of churches inside (and this actually counts for all buildings) you have to pay attention that you are exactly in the middle. If you aren’t in the middle of the building, the ‘distortion’ (because of the wide angle) will be not even. If you look at the image above, the benches are straight, the ceiling is straight, and the side walls are leaning to the front. Because this picture was made in the center, the distortion is even between both sides. If you will make the same picture not from the center, the distortion will become uneven and your shot will be pretty worthless.

Wide angle works very nice for buildings.but you should be very careful for distortion. The great thing about wide angle is the fact that you do not need to be far away to get the whole building in the frame.

Sigma 10-20mm @ 12mm

Sigma 10-20mm @10mm

This last image is a perfect example of ‘frame the whole building from up close’. There were still constructions going on, and there was a 2m high fence around it. I was standing by the fence, keeping the cam above it. I was standing about 10m from the building.

My last use for wide angle is… Panorama shots! *Wait!? In your last blog post you were telling they were not good for panorama!?!?* Yes. I did say that. And it still is true. But a wide angle is awesome in 1 kind of panorama. In my last blogpost I told you get way to much sky in wide angle shots. So when the sky IS the item you want to photograph, wide angle is an awesome solution!

Sigma 10-20mm @ 10mm

Sigma 10-20mm @10mm

Sunsets in city or beach are great in wide angle. I especially love the natural vignetting you get on wide angle. the sun lights the sky most where it went down, so because of the wide angle you get this vignette effect.

Let me know if you know some more great uses for wide angle which I did not cover. Personally I think I’ve got them all. I hope this was an interesting read.

The above shots were made with a flash (+ 1/2 CTB filter) right under the glass bowl and a flash next to the bowl (+ 1/4 CTB filter) to light the background.

In the end I removed the color filters and did some experiments with colored drops.

Setup:

Click on the image to view the setup with explanation.

View the complete 19 image large set on flickr

All the images that I made are without any post-processing. Just raw from the camera.

About 6 months ago I bought myself the Sigma 10-20mm F4-5.6. As a beginning photographer I wanted to have the whole range covered. from 10mm till 300mm. The Sigma 10-20 is an EF-S lens, so it works only on Canon Crop bodies. If we make the calculations for full frame that would be an 16-32 lens.

Anyway. I bought that lens with the idea that 10mm (16mm on FF) will be great for Panorama Shots. Well, think again. 10mm ain’t great for panorama shots. Don’t get me wrong here. I like this lens. It’s a great lens. And 10mm is great in some occasions. But not at all for a panorama. I could write 1 million words why it ain’t good for panorama shots. But instead I’ll show you some shots which I made with some extra words of explanation.

Panorama of Kaunas. Shot with the Sigma 10-20mm @20mm

There you have it. This panorama shot was made on the roof of a church. It is not an artistic shot. I didn’t do any post-processing. But it gives a clear idea of how the view was. In the center of the image you can see the White Dome.

Panorama of Kaunas. Shot with the Sigma 10-20mm @12mm

The same panorama shot @ 12mm. Lets be honest. this looks horrible. The part of sky in the image increased, which is not a problem. But you can see a lot more of the buildings which are really up close. That is the problem. A wide angle lens gives you a very wide view horizontally (that is what we want) but also vertically. And we don’t need that. This implies that all buildings seem to be very far away. Can you still spot the White dome in the center? If you can you will see that all detail in the panorama is lost. Yeah, OK, you can see the buildings which are up close quite good. But everything which is a little bit further (and in a panoramic view, that will be the case in pretty much all of the occasions) lost complete detail.

The next example:

Panorama of Vilnius. Shot with the Sigma 10-20mm @20mm

Panorama of Vilnius. Shot with the Sigma 10-20mm @10mm

Pretty much the same story. Only here it is a lot worse. Again these shots did not have any post processing. Comparing both shots, the percentage of sky has been doubled. The amount of grass is a little bit less, because i didn’t want that my feet would be visible in the frame. The view over the city has doubled in width. But all detail is lost in the 10mm shot. I see a lot of grass and sky, a few tower buildings and that’s it.

Panorama of Vilnius. Shot with the Sigma 10-20mm @10mm and cropped

The only way to make this image ‘OK’ is by cropping it. I roughly cropped 70% away! Now it looks OK, but not great because the detail in the image is lost. This is a low-res panoramic shot. My Canon has a 10MP sensor. Cropping 70% away leaves me a 3MP panoramic shot. In my opinion panoramic shots should be with a decent resolution. And there is only 1 way to do that. Make a series of pictures on a tripod, preferably with a lens of about 50mm, and stitch it in Photoshop.

Conclusion: Do not buy a wide-angle lens for panoramic shots. Unless you are satisfied with low-res quick and easy panoramic shots, Use Photoshop and a series of shots to make a nice panorama. Panoramic shots below 17mm look too wide, and lose a lot of detail. Most kit lenses have a range of 18-50mm. 17-18mm works just fine for panoramas. If you want wider. Photoshop is the way to go.

In my next blog post I will talk about the better uses of a wide angle lens.