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Monday, July 19, 2010

An Intro to Wide Angle Lenses

I was thinking about what to write this week and remembered a friend of mine who takes these great shots.  His name is Mark Payton and he uses a Canon 15mm lens.


In photography a wide angle lens refers to a lens whose focal length is substantially shorter than the focal length of a normal lens for the image size produced by the camera,which is dictated by the dimensions of the photo sensor for digital cameras.  


One of the results is wider lenses tend to magnify distance between objects. Basically this allows for greater depth of field. 



Another result of using a wide-angle lens is a greater apparent perspective distortion when the camera is not aligned perpendicularly to the subject: parallel lines converge at the same rate as with a normal lens, but converge more due to the wider total field. Buildings tend to appear to be falling backwards much more severely when the camera is pointed upward from ground level than they would if photographed with a normal lens Basically this means your subjects appear to "bend" in your photo.

I know this is hard to understand so if you need more clarification post a comment and I will do my best to answer it. The best way to understand is to look at the results. 


The bottom Shot is a photo of his wide angle lens. The rest were taken with Mark's wide angle lens.  Enjoy :)





Click on his name to see more if Mark's Shots on Flickr.com 






















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